Podcasts about too much monkey business

Theme episode time! This one's a simian sensation, so we start off with Chuck Berry's 1957 baboon tune, "Too Much Monkey Business" (2:32:31). Is it anti-monkey, or anti-business? It may not really be about monkeys. but it's rock n roll poetry! The next in the evolutionary order is "Mickey's Monkey", sung by Smokey of Motown's The Miracles (59:37). A dance craze song, this one has a great hook, boozy organ, bongos, and the tasteful licks of one of our fave axemen, Marv Tarplin. Movin' thru the zoo, we arrive at "Gator Tails and Monkey Ribs" by The Spats (1:27:20). A textbook stoopid frat rock rumbler that could have fit on our classic "Food and Drink" themer from May, 2021. If that last one didn't fill you up, then we end with the final primate mover, "Monkey Man" by Baby Huey & The Babysitters (1:54:53). This one's so good, it defies words. So let's just make monkey noises - Lum De Lum De Li!!

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Sean Taylor  | Be Cool  | Short Stories  |  | Half Deaf Clatch  | Back To Basics - Simple Life  | Back To Basics  |  | Cliff Stevens  | Slim Picking  | BETTER DAYS  |  | The Snyders  | You Would Think By Now  | Reaching Higher  |  | Noa & The Hell Drinkers  | No Baggage Claim  | HELL'S THE NEW HEAVEN | Sleepy John Estes  | Married Woman Blues  | Legend Of Sleepy John Estes | Etta Baker  | One Dime Blues  | Classic Blues from the Smithsonian | Jonny Lang  | The Truth - | FIGHT FOR MY SOUL  |  | Mitch Woods  | In The Night  | Friends Along The Way | Blind Blake  | Slippery Rag  | All The Recorded Sides | Rory Block  | Pure Religion  | I Belong To The Band | Chuck Berry  | Too Much Monkey Business  | The Ultimate Collection cd 1 | Bo Diddley  | Road Runner(Live)  | Bo's The Man!  | 

Gurdip is back! The guys discuss the latest FTD releases, early reviews of "Priscilla" and listener feedback before Justin is joined for a brief Elvis chat by young Elvis fan Mal, of TCB Discussions (instagram.com/tcbdiscussions), who has been posting and blogging about Elvis, his career, his life and his influences. It's a very loose talk, but Justin picks her brain on how she became an Elvis fan during the height of pandemic lockdowns, and her journey as a fan these past couple years. You can visit Mal's blog as well over at https://tcbdiscussions.wixsite.com/tcbdiscussions Gurdip re-joins for Song of the Week and he settles in with the Mexican-flavored crooner ballad "You Can't Say No In Acapulco" from 1963's Fun in Acapulco, while Justin finally close a 5-and-a-half-year-long gap, finally tackling the song he'd originally intended to feature way back on Episode 5... and digs into Elvis's 1968 collaboration with Jerry Reed on Chuck Berry's 1956 hit "Too Much Monkey Business," the lyrical changes Elvis made from the original, and of course, the 1980 overdubbed "Guitar Man" version. If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. If you are unable to support us via Patreon, but want to support us another way, please make sure to leave a positive review or mention our show to another like-minded music/movie history enthusiast.

Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers "Flicted": ”Sidelines” (with Ezra Koenig and Blake Mills) ”Tag” ”The Hound” ”Too Much Monkey Business” ”Maybe Now” ”Bucket List” ”Days Ahead” (feat. Danielle Haim) ”Lidar” ”Is This It” ”Had Enough” ”Simple Prayer II” (feat. Z. Berg, Ethan Gruska and Rob Moose) ”Point Omega” Van Morrison “What’s It Gonna Take?: ”Fear And Self-Loathing In Las Vegas” Escuchar audio

Dentro de siete días tendremos a Mamas Gun en nuestro estudio presentando sus nuevas canciones. Descubrimos a November Ultra, a Tré Burt - que estará en dos semanas de gira por España -, a Saphie Wells… Más novedades como la del infatigable Van Morrison, la de Chivo Chivato con la colaboración de Quique González; el disco de Kurt Veil no tiene desperdicio. Buenísimo. Helado Negro, The Feeling, Hiss Golden Messenger, Bruce Hornsby… también estrenan discos. DISCO 1 VAN MORRISON Nervous Breakdown DISCO 2 BRUCE HORNSBY Too Much Monkey Business DISCO 3 THE FEELING There’s No Music DISCO 4 NOVEMBER ULTRA Over & Over & Over DISCO 5 CHIVO CHIVATO & Quique González De nubes y claros DISCO 6 KURT VEIL Cool Water Watch My Moves DISCO 7 TRÉ BURT Carnival Mirror DISCO 8 HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER Still Some Light DISCO 9 SANDRA McCRAKEN Weather With You DISCO 10 CLAIRE ROSINKRANZ Ih8 that i still feel bad for u DISCO 11 SAPHIE WELLS Time DISCO 12 MAMAS GUN Good Love DISCO 13 HELADO NEGRO Ya No Estoy Aqui Escuchar audio

En Música de Contrabando, revista diaria de música en Onda Regional de Murcia (vamos de 23,05 a 01,00h) El nuevo single de Liam Gallagher lleva el nombre de Better Days y se puede escuchar en las principales plataformas digitales como 'el sonido del verano' (Gallager dixit).Rock in Rio Lisboa vuelve en junio y con ello también regresa a Portugal la banda británica Muse, que encabezará el cartel y que se unirá a artistas como Liam Gallagher. Uncut ha elegido los trescientos mejores álbumes publicados desde su nacimiento en 1997 como medio de comunicación. El primer puesto lo ocupa "Blackstar" de David Bowie, que ya fue disco del año para la revista en 2016. Bunbury presenta el vídeo de “Esperando una señal (Oliver theme)”, la canción que ha compuesto para la primera película de ficción de Alexis Morante. Almas Gemelas' es el cuarto y último adelanto del primer álbum de Malamute que verá la luz a finales de mayo. Entre sesiones de grabación con VENEZIOLA (ex-Increíbles Ful), conciertos de Pieles Sebastian, ensayos con Noise Box y la aparición de su último proyecto junto a Manuel Villalba (The Lawyers), Hanns, COBARRO saca un as de la manga y presenta Bien Bien. Glass Animals lanza una versión muy especial de 'I Don't Wanna Talk (I Just Wanna Dance)' que incluye un increíble solo de Albert Hammond Jr. El sonido de Motoharu Okamura está dominado por las guitarras, obviamente, pero cubre un espectro más amplio que Automatics. En su debut recorren la psicodelia ruidista desde Loop a Black Rebel Motorcycle. Antes de lanzar su primer larga duración, Pedriñanes 77 presenta Capitães de Abril, una canción de punk pop que rinde tributo a la revolución de los claveles. Bruce Hornsby presenta una reinvención de "Too Much Monkey Business" de Chuck Berry . Hay una química especial entre Maria Rodés y David Rodríguez a la hora de hacer música, y se nota en todo lo que tocan. Su primer álbum juntos “Contigo” ha dado mucho que hablar y está lleno de momentos mágicos. Volver a empezar está sobrevalorado. Así parecen verlo también Camellos en "Divorcio", su nuevo y single y el tercer y último adelanto que conoceremos antes de que vea la luz "Manual de Estilo", el inminente tercer álbum de estudio de la banda. “¡Que comience el juego!” es el nuevo single de Lücky Dückes. Ess el segundo single de “La teoría del todo”, el nuevo EP que la banda murciana lanzará a lo largo de estos próximos meses y que estará formado por cuatro cortes bastante distintos entre sí. Casi quince años han tenido que pasar para poder volver a pensar en un disco entero de Dr. Explosion. Y todo parece señalar que un nuevo trabajo discográfico saldrá a la luz en el próximo otoño y que "Insatisfacción" es el primer single de adelanto.La banda asturiana comandada por el inefable Jorge Explosion regresa con un intenso y guitarrero single que transpira garage en su máxima expresión. Desde los años 60 Granada ha tenido una fuerte presencia en la música de nuestro país, aportando grandes bandas como Los Ángeles, Miguel Ríos, 091, Lagartija Nick, los Morente, Lapido, JoséAntonio García, Los Planetas, Niños Mutantes, Lori Meyers, Eskorzo o Napoleón Solo. Pablo Sánchez, de Producciones Peligrosas, le ha grabado durante años en un proyecto que ha cristalizado bajo el título de “El ombligo del mundo”, donde cada grupo versiona a otro grupo de la ciudad . El fin último sería mostrar la riqueza musical de la ciudad y las infinitas conexiones que hay entre sus grupos. Y todos los beneficios que genere van destinados a Fundación Escuela de Solidaridad, que acode a personas en riesgo de exclusión. De la mano de Pablo recorremos los profundos surcos de esta aventura musical escuchando a Lori Meyers, Miguel Ríos, Los Planetas, Jose A. García y Enrique Morente.

Elvis's shortest album (with the longest title) also known later as simply "Elvis Sings Flaming Star," was one of the earliest LPs Justin ever owned, so the guys are taking a not-so-objective look at this 1968 promo release that brought together a number of then-previously-unreleased cuts, including Tiger Man, Too Much Monkey Business, Do the Vega and more! Then for Song of the Week, Justin was so taken with the Fun in Acapulco soundtrack recently that he decided to highlight "Vino, Dinero Y Amor" and its pop-opera sound, and Gurdip follows up with a favorite movie tune of his own, 1956's "Let Me" from the film "Love Me Tender."

NOTE: This episode went up before the allegations about Dylan, in a lawsuit filed on Friday, were made public on Monday night. Had I been aware of them, I would at least have commented at the beginning of the episode. Episode one hundred and thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, and the controversy over Dylan going electric, Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Hold What You've Got" by Joe Tex. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum A couple of times I refer to “CBS”. Dylan's label in the US was Columbia Records, a subsidiary of CBS Inc, but in the rest of the world the label traded as “CBS Records”. I should probably have used “Columbia” throughout... Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Dylan. Much of the information in this episode comes from Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. The New Yorker article by Nat Hentoff I talk about is here. And for the information about the writing of "Like a Rolling Stone", I relied on yet another book by Heylin, All the Madmen. Dylan's albums up to 1967 can all be found in their original mono mixes on this box set. And Dylan's performances at Newport from 1963 through 1965 are on this DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's a story that everyone tells about Bob Dylan in 1965, the story that has entered into legend. It's the story that you'll see in most of the biographies of him, and in all those coffee-table histories of rock music put out by glossy music magazines. Bob Dylan, in this story, was part of the square, boring, folk scene until he plugged in an electric guitar and just blew the minds of all those squares, who immediately ostracised him forever for being a Judas and betraying their traditionalist acoustic music, but he was just too cool and too much of a rebel to be bound by their rules, man. Pete Seeger even got an axe and tried to cut his way through the cables of the amplifiers, he was so offended by the desecration of the Newport Folk Festival. And like all these stories, it's an oversimplification but there's an element of truth to it too. So today, we're going to look at what actually happened when Dylan went electric. We're going to look at what led to him going electric, and at the truth behind the legend of Seeger's axe. And we're going to look at the masterpiece at the centre of it all, a record that changed rock songwriting forever. We're going to look at Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] While we've seen Dylan turn up in all sorts of episodes -- most recently the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", the last time we looked at him in detail was in the episode on "Blowin' in the Wind", and when we left him there he had just recorded his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but it had not yet been released. As we'll see, Dylan was always an artist who moved on very quickly from what he'd been doing before, and that had started as early as that album. While his first album, produced by John Hammond, had been made up almost entirely of traditional songs and songs he'd learned from Dave van Ronk or Eric von Schmidt, with only two originals, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan had started out being produced by Hammond, but as Hammond and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman had come to find it difficult to work together, the last few tracks had been produced by Tom Wilson. We've mentioned Wilson briefly a couple of times already, but to reiterate, Wilson was a Black Harvard graduate and political conservative whose background was in jazz and who had no knowledge of or love for folk music. But Wilson saw two things in Dylan -- the undeniable power of his lyrics, and his vocals, which Wilson compared to Ray Charles. Wilson wanted to move Dylan towards working with a backing band, and this was something that Dylan was interested in doing, but his first experiment with that, with John Hammond, hadn't been a particular success. Dylan had recorded a single backed with a band -- "Mixed-Up Confusion", backed with "Corrina, Corrina", a version of an old song that had been recorded by both Bob Wills and Big Joe Turner, but had recently been brought back to the public mind by a version Phil Spector had produced for Ray Peterson. Dylan's version of that song had a country lope and occasional breaks into Jimmie Rodgers style keening that foreshadow his work of the late sixties: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Corrina, Corrina (single version)"] A different take of that track was included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album that was made up almost entirely of originals. Those originals fell into roughly two types -- there were songs like "Masters of War", "Blowin' in the Wind", and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" which dealt in some way with the political events of the time -- the fear of nuclear war, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and more -- but did so in an elliptical, poetic way; and there were songs about distance in a relationship -- songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", which do a wonderful job at portraying a young man's conflicted feelings -- the girl has left him, and he wants her back, but he wants to pretend that he doesn't.  While it's always a bad idea to look for a direct autobiographical interpretation of Dylan's lyrics, it seems fairly safe to say that these songs were inspired by Dylan's feelings for his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who had gone travelling in Europe and not seen him for eight months, and who he was worried he would never see again, and he does seem to have actually had several conflicting feelings about this, ranging from desperation for her to come back through to anger and resentment. The surprising thing about The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is that it's a relatively coherent piece of work, despite being recorded with two different producers over a period of more than a year, and that recording being interrupted by Dylan's own travels to the UK, his separation from and reconciliation with Rotolo, and a change of producers. If you listened to it, you would get an impression of exactly who Dylan was -- you'd come away from it thinking that he was an angry, talented, young man who was trying to merge elements of both traditional English folk music and Robert Johnson style Delta blues with poetic lyrics related to what was going on in the young man's life. By the next album, that opinion of Dylan would have to be reworked, and it would have to be reworked with every single album that came out.  But The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out at the perfect time for Dylan to step into the role of "spokesman for a generation" -- a role which he didn't want, and to which he wasn't particularly suited. Because it came out in May 1963, right at the point at which folk music was both becoming hugely more mainstream, and becoming more politicised. And nothing showed both those things as well as the Hootenanny boycott: [Excerpt: The Brothers Four, “Hootenanny Saturday Night”] We've talked before about Hootenanny, the folk TV show, but what we haven't mentioned is that there was a quite substantial boycott of that show by some of the top musicians in folk music at the time. The reason for this is that Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the folk movement, and his old band the Weavers, were both blacklisted from the show because of Seeger's Communist leanings. The Weavers were --- according to some sources -- told that they could go on if they would sign a loyalty oath, but they refused. It's hard for those of us who weren't around at the time to really comprehend both just how subversive folk music was considered, and how seriously subversion was taken in the USA of the early 1960s. To give a relevant example -- Suze Rotolo was pictured on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Because of this, her cousin's husband, who was in the military, lost his security clearance and didn't get a promotion he was in line for. Again,  someone lost his security clearance because his wife's cousin was pictured on the cover of a Bob Dylan album. So the blacklisting of Seeger and the Weavers was considered a serious matter by the folk music community, and people reacted very strongly. Joan Baez announced that she wouldn't be going on Hootenanny until they asked Seeger on, and Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Dave van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, among many others, all refused to go on the show as a result. But the odd thing was, whenever anyone *actually asked* Pete Seeger what he thought they should do, he told them they should go on the TV show and use it as an opportunity to promote the music. So while the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary, two of the biggest examples of the commercialisation of folk music that the serious purists sneered at, were refusing to go on the TV in solidarity with a Communist, that Communist's brother, Mike Seeger, happily went on Hootenanny with his band the New Lost City Ramblers, and when the Tarriers were invited on to the show but it clashed with one of their regular bookings, Pete Seeger covered their booking for them so they could appear. Dylan was on the side of the boycotters, though he was not too clear on exactly why. When he spoke about  the boycott on stage, this is what he had to say: [Excerpt: Dylan talks about the boycott. Transcript: "Now a friend of mine, a friend of all yours I'm sure, Pete Seeger's been blacklisted [applause]. He and another group called the Weavers who are around New York [applause] I turned down that television show, but I got no right [applause] but . . . I feel bad turning it down, because the Weavers and Pete Seeger can't be on it. They oughta turn it down. They aren't even asked to be on it because they are blacklisted. Uh—which is, which is a bad thing. I don't know why it's bad, but it's just bad, it's bad all around."] Hootenanny started broadcasting in April 1963, just over a month before The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out, and so it would have been a good opportunity for publicity for him -- but turning the show down was also good publicity. Hootenanny wouldn't be the only opportunity to appear on TV that he was offered. It would also not be the only one he turned down. In May, Dylan was given the opportunity to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, but he agreed on one condition -- that he be allowed to sing "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues". For those who don't know, the John Birch Society is a far-right conspiratorial organisation which had a huge influence on the development of the American right-wing in the middle of the twentieth century, and is responsible for perpetuating almost every conspiracy theory that has exerted a malign influence on the country and the world since that time. They were a popular punching bag for the left and centre, and for good reason -- we heard the Chad Mitchell Trio mocking them, for example, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" a couple of weeks ago.  So Dylan insisted that if he was going to go on the Ed Sullivan Show, it would only be to perform his song about them: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues"] Now, the Ed Sullivan Show was not interested in having Dylan sing a song that would upset a substantial proportion of its audience, on what was after all meant to be an entertainment show, and so Dylan didn't appear on the show -- and he got a big publicity boost from his principled refusal to make a TV appearance that would have given him a big publicity boost. It's interesting to note in this context that Dylan himself clearly didn't actually think very much of the song -- he never included it on any of his albums, and it remained unreleased for decades. By this point, Dylan had started dating Joan Baez, with whom he would have an on-again off-again relationship for the next couple of years, even though at this point he was also still seeing Suze Rotolo. Baez was one of the big stars of the folk movement, and like Rotolo she was extremely politically motivated. She was also a fan of Dylan's writing, and had started recording versions of his songs on her albums: [Excerpt: Joan Baez, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] The relationship between the two of them became much more public when they appeared together at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. The Newport Folk Festival had started in 1959, as a spinoff from the successful Newport Jazz Festival, which had been going for a number of years previously. As there was a large overlap between the jazz and folk music fanbases -- both musics appealed at this point to educated, middle-class, liberals who liked to think of themselves as a little bit Bohemian -- the Jazz Festival had first started putting on an afternoon of folk music during its normal jazz programme, and then spun that off into a whole separate festival, initially with the help of Albert Grossman, who advised on which acts should be booked (and of course included several of the acts he managed on the bill). Both Newport festivals had been shut down after rioting at the 1960 Jazz Festival, as three thousand more people had turned up for the show than there was capacity for, and the Marines had had to be called in to clear the streets of angry jazz fans, but the jazz  festival had returned in 1962, and in 1963 the folk festival came back as well. By this time, Albert Grossman was too busy to work for the festival, and so its organisation was taken over by a committee headed by Pete Seeger.  At that 1963 festival, even though Dylan was at this point still a relative unknown compared to some of the acts on the bill, he was made the headliner of the first night, which finished with his set, and then with him bringing Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger and the Freedom Singers out to sing with him on "Blowin' in the Wind" and "We Shall Overcome".  To many people, Dylan's appearance in 1963 was what launched him from being "one of the rising stars of the folk movement" to being the most important musician in the movement -- still just one of many, but the first among equals. He was now being talked of in the same terms as Joan Baez or Pete Seeger, and was also starting to behave like someone as important as them -- like he was a star. And that was partly because Baez was promoting Dylan, having him duet with her on stage on his songs -- though few would now argue that the combination of their voices did either artist any favours, Baez's pure, trained, voice, rubbing up against Dylan's more idiosyncratic phrasing in ways that made both sound less impressive: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, "With God On Our Side (live at Newport 1963)"] At the end of 1963, Dylan recorded his third album, which came out in early 1964. The Times They Are A-Changin' seems to be Dylan's least personal album to this point, and seems to have been written as a conscious attempt to write the kind of songs that people wanted and expected from him -- there were songs about particular recent news events, like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll",  the true story of the murder of a Black woman by a white man, and  "Only a Pawn in Their Game", about the murder of the Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers. There were fictional dramatisations of the kind of effects that real-world social problems were having on people, like "North Country Blues", in which the callous way mining towns were treated by capital leads to a woman losing her parents, brother, husband, and children, or "The Ballad of Hollis Brown", about a farmer driven to despair by poverty who ends up killing his whole family and himself. As you can imagine, it's not a very cheery album, but it's one that impressed a lot of people, especially its title track, which was very deliberately written as an anthem for the new social movements that were coming up: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"] But it was a bleak album, with none of the humour that had characterised Dylan's first two albums. Soon after recording the album, Dylan had a final split with Rotolo, went travelling for a while, and took LSD for the first time. He also started to distance himself from Baez at this point, though the two would remain together until mid 1965. He seems to have regarded the political material he was doing as a mistake, as something he was doing for other people, rather than because that was what he wanted to do.  He toured the UK in early 1964, and then returned to the US in time to record his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. It can be argued that this is the point where Dylan really becomes himself, and starts making music that's the music he wants to make, rather than music that he thinks other people want him to make.  The entire album was recorded in one session, along with a few tracks that didn't make the cut -- like the early version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Ramblin' Jack Elliott that we heard in the episode on that song. Elliott was in attendance, as were a number of Dylan's other friends, though the album features only Dylan performing. Also there was the journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote a full account of the recording session for the New Yorker, which I'll link in the show notes.  Dylan told Hentoff "“There aren't any finger-pointing songs in here, either. Those records I've already made, I'll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn't see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don't want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman. Like I once wrote about Emmett Till in the first person, pretending I was him. From now on, I want to write from inside me, and to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten—having everything come out naturally." Dylan was right to say that there were no finger-pointing songs. The songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan were entirely personal -- "Ballad in Plain D", in particular, is Dylan's take on the night he split up with Suze Rotolo, laying the blame -- unfairly, as he would later admit -- on her older sister. The songs mostly dealt with love and relationships, and as a result were ripe for cover versions. The opening track, in particular, "All I Really Want to Do", which in Dylan's version was a Jimmie Rodgers style hillbilly tune, became the subject of duelling cover versions. The Byrds' version came out as the follow-up to their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "All I Really Want to Do"] But Cher also released a version -- which the Byrds claimed came about when Cher's husband Sonny Bono secretly taped a Byrds live show where they performed the song before they'd released it, and he then stole their arrangement: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] In America, the Byrds' version only made number forty on the charts, while Cher made number fifteen. In the UK, where both artists were touring at the time to promote the single, Cher made number nine but the Byrds charted higher at number four.  Both those releases came out after the album came out in late 1964, but even before it was released, Dylan was looking for other artists to cover his new songs. He found one at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where he met Johnny Cash for the first time. Cash had been a fan of Dylan for some time -- and indeed, he's often credited as being the main reason why CBS persisted with Dylan after his first album was unsuccessful, as Cash had lobbied for him within the company -- and he'd recently started to let that influence show. His most recent hit, "Understand Your Man", owed more than a little to Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", and Cash had also started recording protest songs. At Newport, Cash performed his own version of "Don't Think Twice": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] Cash and Dylan met up, with June Carter and Joan Baez, in Baez's hotel room, and according to later descriptions they were both so excited to meet each other they were bouncing with excitement, jumping up and down on the beds. They played music together all night, and Dylan played some of his new songs for Cash. One of them was "It Ain't Me Babe", a song that seems at least slightly inspired by "She Loves You" -- you can sing the "yeah, yeah, yeah" and "no, no, no" together -- and which was the closing track of Another Side of Bob Dylan. Cash soon released his own version of the song, which became a top five country hit: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "It Ain't Me Babe"] But it wasn't long after meeting Cash that Dylan met the group who may have inspired that song -- and his meeting with the Beatles seems to have confirmed in him his decision that he needed to move away from the folk scene and towards making pop records. This was something that Tom Wilson had been pushing for for a while -- Wilson had told Dylan's manager Albert Grossman that if they could get Dylan backed by a good band, they'd have a white Ray Charles on their hands. As an experiment, Wilson took some session musicians into the studio and had them overdub an electric backing on Dylan's acoustic version of "House of the Rising Sun", basing the new backing on the Animals' hit version. The result wasn't good enough to release, but it did show that there was a potential for combining Dylan's music with the sound of electric guitars and drums: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (electric version)”] Dylan was also being influenced by his friend John Hammond Jr, the blues musician son of Dylan's first producer, and a veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Hammond had decided that he wanted to show the British R&B bands what proper American blues sounded like, and so he'd recruited a group of mostly-Canadian musicians to back him on an electric album. His "So Many Roads" album featured three members of a group called Levon and the Hawks -- Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Robbie Robertson -- who had recently quit working for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins -- plus harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite and Mike Bloomfield, who was normally a guitarist but who is credited on piano for the album: [Excerpt: John Hammond, Jr. "Who Do You Love?"] Dylan was inspired by Hammond's sound, and wanted to get the same sound on his next record, though he didn't consider hiring the same musicians. Instead, for his next album he brought in Bruce Langhorne, the tambourine man himself, on guitar, Bobby Gregg -- a drummer who had been the house drummer for Cameo-Parkway and played on hits by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and others; the session guitarists Al Gorgoni and Kenny Rankin, piano players Frank Owens and Paul Griffin, and two bass players, Joseph Macho and William Lee, the father of the film director Spike Lee. Not all of these played on all the finished tracks -- and there were other tracks recorded during the sessions, where Dylan was accompanied by Hammond and another guitarist, John Sebastian, that weren't used at all -- but that's the lineup that played on Dylan's first electric album, Bringing it All Back Home. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" actually takes more inspiration than one might imagine from the old-school folk singers Dylan was still associating with. Its opening lines seem to be a riff on "Taking it Easy", a song that had originally been written in the forties by Woody Guthrie for the Almanac Singers, where it had been a song about air-raid sirens: [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Taking it Easy"] But had then been rewritten by Pete Seeger for the Weavers, whose version had included this verse that wasn't in the original: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Taking it Easy"] Dylan took that verse, and the basic Guthrie-esque talking blues rhythm, and connected it to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" with its rapid-fire joking blues lyrics: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] But Dylan's lyrics were a radical departure, a freeform, stream-of-consciousness proto-psychedelic lyric inspired as much by the Beat poets as by any musician -- it's no coincidence that in the promotional film Dylan made for the song, one of the earliest examples of what would become known as the rock video, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg makes an appearance: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] "Subterranean Homesick Blues" made the top forty in the US -- it only made number thirty-nine, but it was Dylan's first single to chart at all in the US. And it made the top ten in the UK -- but it's notable that even over here, there was still some trepidation about Dylan's new direction. To promote his UK tour, CBS put out a single of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and that too made the top ten, and spent longer on the charts than "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Indeed, it seems like everyone was hedging their bets. The opening side of Bringing it All Back Home is all electric, but the B-side is made up entirely of acoustic performances, though sometimes with a little added electric guitar countermelody -- it's very much in the same style as Dylan's earlier albums, and seems to be a way of pulling back after testing the waters, of reassuring people who might have been upset by the change in style on the first side that this was still the same Dylan they knew.  And the old Dylan certainly still had plenty of commercial life in him. Indeed, when Dylan went to the UK for a tour in spring of 1965, he found that British musicians were trying to copy his style -- a young man called Donovan seemed to be doing his best to *be* Dylan, with even the title of his debut hit single seeming to owe something to "Blowing in the Wind": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Catch the Wind (original single version)"] On that UK tour, Dylan performed solo as he always had -- though by this point he had taken to bringing along an entourage. Watching the classic documentary of that tour, Dont Look Back, it's quite painful to see Dylan's cruelty to Joan Baez, who had come along on the expectation that she would be duetting with him occasionally, as he had dueted with her, but who is sidelined, tormented, and ignored. It's even worse to see Bob Neuwirth,  a hanger-on who is very obviously desperate to impress Dylan by copying all his mannerisms and affectations, doing the same. It's unsurprising that this was the end of Dylan and Baez's relationship. Dylan's solo performances on that tour went down well, but some of his fans questioned him about his choice to make an electric record. But he wasn't going to stop recording with electric musicians. Indeed, Tom Wilson also came along on the tour, and while he was in England he made an attempt to record a track with the members of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers -- Mayall, Hughie Flint, Eric Clapton, and John McVie, though it was unsuccessful and only a low-fidelity fragment of it circulates: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] Also attending that session was a young wannabe singer from Germany who Dylan had taken up with, though their dalliance was very brief. During the session Dylan cut a demo of a song he planned to give her, but Nico didn't end up recording "I'll Keep it With Mine" until a couple of years later. But one other thing happened in England. After the UK tour, Dylan travelled over to Europe for a short tour, then returned to the UK to do a show for the BBC -- his first full televised concert. Unfortunately, that show never went ahead -- there was a party the night before, and Dylan was hospitalised after it with what was said to be food poisoning. It might even actually have been food poisoning, but take a listen to the episode I did on Vince Taylor, who was also at that party, and draw your own conclusions. Anyway, Dylan was laid up in bed for a while, and took the opportunity to write what he's variously described as being ten or twenty pages of stream of consciousness vomit, out of which he eventually took four pages of lyrics, a vicious attack on a woman who was originally the protagonist's social superior, but has since fallen. He's never spoken in any detail about what or who the subject of the song was, but given that it was written just days after his breakup with Baez, it's not hard to guess. The first attempt at recording the song was a false start. On June the fifteenth, Dylan and most of the same musicians who'd played on his previous album went into the studio to record it, along with Mike Bloomfield, who had played on that John Hammond album that had inspired Dylan and was now playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield had been surprised when Dylan had told him that he didn't want the kind of string-bending electric blues that Bloomfield usually played, but he managed to come up with something Dylan approved of -- but the song was at this point in waltz time: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (early version)"] The session ended, but Joe Macho, Al Gorgoni and Bobby Gregg stayed around after the session, when Tom Wilson called in another session guitarist to join them in doing the same trick he'd done on "House of the Rising Sun", overdubbing new instruments on a flop acoustic record he'd produced for a Greenwich Village folk duo who'd already split up. But we'll hear more about "The Sound of Silence" in a few weeks' time. The next day, the same musicians came back, along with one new one. Al Kooper had been invited by Wilson to come along and watch the session, but he was determined that he was going to play on whatever was recorded. He got to the session early, brought his guitar and amp in and got tuned up before Wilson arrived. But then Kooper heard Bloomfield play, realised that he simply couldn't play at anything remotely like the same standard, and decided he'd be best off staying in the control room after all.  But then, before they started recording "Like a Rolling Stone", which by now was in 4/4 time, Frank Owens, who had been playing organ, switched to piano and left his organ on. Kooper saw his chance -- he played a bit of keyboards, too, and the song was in C, which is the easiest key to play in. Kooper asked Wilson if he could go and play, and Wilson didn't exactly say no, so Kooper went into the studio and sat at the organ.  Kooper improvised the organ line that became the song's most notable instrumental part, but you will notice that it's mixed quite low in the track. This is because Wilson was unimpressed with Kooper's playing, which is technically pretty poor -- indeed, for much of the song, Kooper is a beat behind the rest of the band, waiting for them to change chords and then following the change on the next measure. Luckily, Kooper is also a good enough natural musician that he made this work, and it gave the song a distinctive sound: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] The finished record came in at around six minutes -- and here I should just mention that most books on the subject say that the single was six minutes and thirteen seconds long. That's the length of the stereo mix of the song on the stereo version of the album. The mono mix on the mono album, which we just heard, is five minutes fifty-eight, as it has a shorter fade. I haven't been able to track down a copy of the single as released in 1965, but usually the single mix would be the same as the mono album mix. Whatever the exact length, it was much, much, longer than the norm for a single -- the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" had been regarded as ridiculously long at four and a half minutes -- and Columbia originally wanted to split the song over two sides of a single. But eventually it was released as one side, in full: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] That's Bruce Langhorne there playing that rather sloppy tambourine part, high in the mix. The record made the top five in the UK, and reached number two in the US, only being held off from the top spot by "Help!" by the Beatles.  It would, however, be the last track that Tom Wilson produced for Dylan. Nobody knows what caused their split after three and a half albums working together -- and everything suggests that on the UK tour in the Spring, the two were very friendly. But they had some sort of disagreement, about which neither of them would ever speak, other than a comment by Wilson in an interview shortly before his death in which he said that Dylan had told him he was going to get Phil Spector to produce his records. In the event, the rest of the album Dylan was working on would be produced by Bob Johnston, who would be Dylan's regular producer until the mid-seventies. So "Like a Rolling Stone" was a major break in Dylan's career, and there was another one shortly after its release, when Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival for the third time, in what has become possibly the single most discussed and analysed performance in folk or rock music. The most important thing to note here is that there was not a backlash among the folk crowd against electric instruments. The Newport Folk Festival had *always* had electric performers -- John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash and The Staple Singers had all performed with electric guitars and nobody had cared. What there was, was a backlash against pop music. You see, up until the Beatles hit America, the commercial side of folk music had been huge. Acts like the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, and so on had been massive. Most of the fans at the Newport Folk Festival actually despised many of these acts as sell-outs, doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved. But at the same time, those acts *were* doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved, and by doing so they were exposing more people to that traditional music. They were making programmes like Hootenanny possible -- and the folkies didn't like Hootenanny, but Hootenanny existing meant that the New Lost City Ramblers got an audience they would otherwise not have got. There was a recognition, then, that the commercialised folk music that many of them despised was nonetheless important in the development of a thriving scene. And it was those acts, the Kingston Trios and Peter, Paul, and Marys, who were fast losing their commercial relevance because of the renewed popularity of rock music. If Hootenanny gets cancelled and Shindig put on in its place, that's great for fans of the Righteous Brothers and Sam Cooke, but it's not so great if you want to hear "Tom Dooley" or "If I Had a Hammer". And so many of the old guard in the folk movement weren't wary of electric guitars *as instruments*, but they were wary of anything that looked like someone taking sides with the new pop music rather than the old folk music. For Dylan's first performance at the festival in 1965, he played exactly the set that people would expect of him, and there was no problem. The faultlines opened up, not with Dylan's first performance, but with the performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as part of a history of the blues, presented by Alan Lomax. Lomax had no objection to rock and roll -- indeed, earlier in the festival the Chambers Brothers, a Black electric group from Mississippi, had performed a set of rock and R&B songs, and Lomax had come on stage afterwards and said “I'm very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music: rock 'n' roll!” But Lomax didn't think that the Butterfield band met his criteria of "authenticity". And he had a point. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were an integrated group -- their rhythm section were Black musicians who had played with Howlin' Wolf -- and they'd gained experience through playing Chicago blues on the South Side of Chicago, but their leader, Butterfield, was a white man, as was Mike Bloomfield, their guitarist, and so they'd quickly moved to playing clubs on the North side, where Black musicians had generally not been able to play. Butterfield and Bloomfield were both excellent musicians, but they were closer to the British blues lovers who were making up groups like the Rolling Stones, Animals, and Manfred Mann. There was a difference -- they were from Chicago, not from the Home Counties -- but they were still scholars coming at the music from the outside, rather than people who'd grown up with the music and had it as part of their culture. The Butterfield Band were being promoted as a sort of American answer to the Stones, and they had been put on Lomax's bill rather against his will -- he wanted to have some Chicago blues to illustrate that part of the music, but why not Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf, rather than this new group who had never really done anything? One he'd never even heard -- but who he knew that Albert Grossman was thinking about managing. So his introduction to the Butterfield Blues Band's performance was polite but hardly rapturous. He said "Us white cats always moved in, a little bit late, but tried to catch up...I understand that this present combination has not only caught up but passed the rest. That's what I hear—I'm anxious to find out whether it's true or not." He then introduced the musicians, and they started to play an old Little Walter song: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Juke"] But after the set, Grossman was furious at Lomax, asking him what kind of introduction that was meant to be. Lomax responded by asking if Grossman wanted a punch in the mouth, Grossman hurled a homophobic slur at Lomax, and the two men started hitting each other and rolling round in the dirt, to the amusement of pretty much everyone around. But Lomax and Grossman were both far from amused. Lomax tried to get the Festival board to kick Grossman out, and almost succeeded, until someone explained that if they did, then that would mean that all Grossman's acts, including huge names like Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, would also be out.  Nobody's entirely sure whose idea it was, but it seems to have been Grossman who thought that since Bloomfield had played on Dylan's recent single, it might be an idea to get the Butterfield Blues Band to back Dylan on stage, as a snub to Lomax. But the idea seems to have cohered properly when Grossman bumped into Al Kooper, who was attending the festival just as an audience member. Grossman gave Kooper a pair of backstage passes, and told him to meet up with Dylan. And so, for Dylan's performance on the Sunday -- scheduled in the middle of the day, rather than as the headliner as most people expected, he appeared with an electric guitar, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Kooper. He opened with his recent single "Maggie's Farm", and followed it with the new one, "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live at Newport)"] After those two songs, the group did one more, a song called "Phantom Engineer", which they hadn't rehearsed properly and which was an utter train wreck. And then they left the stage. And there was booing. How much booing, and what the cause was, is hard to say, but everyone agrees there was some. Some people claim that the booing was just because the set had been so short, others say that the audience was mostly happy but there were just a few people booing. And others say that the booing mostly came from the front -- that there were sound problems that meant that while the performance sounded great to people further back, there was a tremendous level of distortion near the front. That's certainly what Pete Seeger said. Seeger was visibly distraught and angry at the sounds coming from the stage. He later said, and I believe him, that it wasn't annoyance at Dylan playing with an electric band, but at the distorted sound. He said he couldn't hear the words, that the guitar was too loud compared to the vocals, and in particular that his father, who was an old man using a hearing aid, was in actual physical pain at the sound. According to Joe Boyd, later a famous record producer but at this time just helping out at the festival, Seeger, the actor Theodore Bikel, and Alan Lomax, all of whom were on the festival board, told Boyd to take a message to Paul Rothchild, who was working the sound, telling him that the festival board ordered him to lower the volume. When Boyd got there, he found Rothchild there with Albert Grossman and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who was also on the board. When Boyd gave his message, Yarrow responded that the board was "adequately represented at the sound controls", that the sound was where the musicians wanted it, and gave Boyd a message to take back to the other board members, consisting of a single raised middle finger. Whatever the cause of the anger, which was far from universal, Dylan was genuinely baffled and upset at the reaction -- while it's been portrayed since, including by Dylan himself at times, as a deliberate act of provocation on Dylan's part, it seems that at the time he was just going on stage with his new friends, to play his new songs in front of some of his old friends and a crowd that had always been supportive of him. Eventually Peter Yarrow, who was MCing, managed to persuade Dylan to go back on stage and do a couple more numbers, alone this time as the band hadn't rehearsed any more songs. He scrounged up an acoustic guitar, went back on, spent a couple of minutes fiddling around with the guitar, got a different guitar because something was wrong with that one, played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", spent another couple of minutes tuning up, and then finally played "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live at Newport)"] But that pause while Dylan was off stage scrounging an acoustic guitar from somewhere led to a rumour that has still got currency fifty-six years later. Because Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm, said "He's gone to get his axe" -- using musicians' slang for a guitar. But many of the crowd didn't know that slang. But they had seen Pete Seeger furious, and they'd also seen, earlier in the festival, a demonstration of work-songs, sung by people who kept time by chopping wood, and according to some people Seeger had joined in with that demonstration, swinging an axe as he sang. So the audience put two and two together, and soon the rumour was going round the festival -- Pete Seeger had been so annoyed by Dylan going electric he'd tried to chop the cables with an axe, and had had to be held back from doing so. Paul Rothchild even later claimed to have seen Seeger brandishing it. The rumour became so pervasive that in later years, even as he denied doing it, Seeger tried to explain it away by saying that he might have said something like "I wish I had an axe so I could cut those cables". In fact, Seeger wasn't angry at Dylan, as much as he was concerned -- shortly afterwards he wrote a private note to himself trying to sort out his own feelings, which said in part "I like some rock and roll a great deal. Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. I confess that, like blues and like flamenco music, I can't listen to it for a long time at a stretch. I just don't feel that aggressive, personally. But I have a question. Was the sound at Newport from Bob's aggregation good rock and roll?  I once had a vision of a beast with hollow fangs. I first saw it when my mother-in-law, who I loved very much, died of cancer... Who knows, but I am one of the fangs that has sucked Bob dry. It is in the hope that I can learn that I write these words, asking questions I need help to answer, using language I never intended. Hoping that perhaps I'm wrong—but if I am right, hoping that it won't happen again." Seeger would later make his own electric albums, and he would always continue to be complimentary towards Dylan in public. He even repeatedly said that while he still wished he'd been able to hear the words and that the guitar had been mixed quieter, he knew he'd been on the wrong side, and that if he had the time over he'd have gone on stage and asked the audience to stop booing Dylan. But the end result was the same -- Dylan was now no longer part of the Newport Folk Festival crowd. He'd moved on and was now a pop star, and nothing was going to change that. He'd split with Suze, he'd split with Joan Baez, he'd split with Tom Wilson, and now he'd split with his peer group. From now on Dylan wasn't a spokesman for his generation, or the leader of a movement. He was a young man with a leather jacket and a Stratocaster, and he was going to make rock music. And we'll see the results of that in future episodes.

Intro Song – Rick Estrin & The Nightcats, “Contemporary”, Contemporary First Set – King Solomon Hicks, “I'd Rather Be Blind”, HarlemBobby Rush, “Down In Mississippi”, Rawer Than RawChristone “Kingfish” Ingram featuring Keb Mo, “Listen”, Kingfish Second Set –John Primer & Bob Corritore, “Gambling Blues”, The Gypsy Woman Told Me Cutis Salgado, “The Longer That I Live”, Damage ControlElvin Bishop & Charlie Musselwhite, “One Hundred Years of Blues”, 100 Years of BluesMike Zito & Friends, “Too Much Monkey Business”, Rock ‘n' Roll: A Tribute to Chuck Berry Third SetShemekia Copeland, “Uncivil War”, Uncivil War Danielle Nicole, “How Come You Don't Call Me Anymore”, Cry No More Kenny “Beedy Eyes” Smith, “Hey Daddy”, Drop The Hammer Fourth Set – Kim Wilson, “Wingin' It”, Take Me Back – The Bigtone Sessions Anthony Geraci, “Tutti Frutti Booty”, Daydreams In Blue Jimmy Carpenter, “One Mint Julip”, Soul Doctor

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  Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell’s research. The information on the precursors to the “Johnny B. Goode” intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum.  And for information about Freed, I used  Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week’s, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that’s likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you’ll be OK, or come back next week. Today we’re going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there’d been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That’s what an important record “Johnny B. Goode” is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he’d just released “School Day”, which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry’s career didn’t go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, “Oh Baby Doll”, was a comparative flop — it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll’s premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about “these rhythm and blues”, this time he was going to use the music’s new name, and he was singing “just let me hear some of that rock and roll music”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn’t have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, “Reelin’ and Rockin'”, was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, “Round the Clock Blues”. Harris’ song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis’ band, was an inspiration for “Rock Around the Clock” among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Round the Clock Blues”] Berry’s version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content — though that would later come back in live performances of the song — and played up the song’s similarity to “Rock Around the Clock”, but it’s still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry’s name — for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry’s songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry’s earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I’ve seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I’m going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he’s playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry’s last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called “ripping” when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis’ records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry’s new records. Johnson didn’t like the sound, which he considered “all flash and no technique”, but Chess insisted — to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he “’bout tore my thumbnail off” getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though — simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session — this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] “Sweet Little Sixteen” was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course — things like “Drugstore Rock & Roll” or “Rip it Up” — but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It’s not completely about that, sadly — it’s the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it’s also about how “everybody wants to dance with” this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her “tight dresses and lipstick” — but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it’s one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby — not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about “Sweet Little Sixteen” is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they’ll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to “on Bandstand” and “in Philadelphia PA”, which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It’s a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry’s mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for “Reelin’ and Rockin'” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, came another session for what would become Berry’s most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It’s instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to “Johnny B. Goode” is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] But that guitar part has a long history — it’s original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it’s based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan’s guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song “Bluin’ the Blues”, you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra, “Bluin’ the Blues”] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Got the Blues”, in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Got the Blues”] In Blind Blake’s “Too Tight”, also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Too Tight”] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan’s playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he’s playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, “Shufflin’ the Blues”] Berry took Walker’s playing style, and combined it with Hogan’s note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician’s toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to “Fun, Fun, Fun”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] Absolutely no-one listening thought “Oh, he’s riffing off ‘Texas Shout’ by Cow Cow Davenport” — everyone instantly thought “Oh, that’s the intro to ‘Johnny B. Goode'”. Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician’s toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying “Johnnie, be good”, stop drinking so much — a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him — something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing “a country boy”, he sang “a coloured boy”. But there’s another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that’s in the very title itself. Goode is spelled “G-o-o-d-e”, with an “e” on the end — and Berry’s childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There’s another possible origin as well — the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called “Berry”, about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in “Berry” rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of “Johnny B. Goode” and say “well, this came from there, and this came from there”, but still you’re no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it’s the combination of all these elements in a way that they’d never been put together before that is Berry’s genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. “Johnny B. Goode” was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed’s final film — a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed’s co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I’ve mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn’t mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed’s career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career — rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn’t have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed’s downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They’d forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen — the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said “It looks like the Boston police don’t want you to have a good time.” The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed — so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they’d been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn’t end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he’d been hired, the station was losing money, and he’d been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn’t need to take risks, and they’d been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed’s contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we’ve talked about before — record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like “Maybellene” and “Sincerely” – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much — Dick Clark certainly did — and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what — this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn’t like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it’s just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It’s an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis’ own underage sex scandal — well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He’d promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry’s case than in Lewis’, because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men — indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s not like this was an isolated incident — he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race — and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks — it’s still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I’m not going to spend much more time on this with Berry — not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week — and that’s because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there’s a myth that Berry’s career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn’t true. It’s true that “Johnny B. Goode” was Berry’s last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He’d released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like “Thirty Days”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “You Can’t Catch Me” had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn’t end up going to jail until 1961. “Johnny B. Goode” came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there’s a simple reason why Berry didn’t chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists — and all artists in the fifties were singles artists — who can survive a major change in the public’s taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t his best. There were some good songs — things like “Carol”, “Little Queenie”, and “I’ve Got to Find My Baby” — but even those weren’t Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like “Anthony Boy” and “Too Pooped to Pop”, which very few of even Berry’s most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception — during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, “Memphis, Tennessee”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Memphis, Tennessee”] While it’s a travesty that that record didn’t chart, in retrospect it’s easy to see why it didn’t. Berry’s audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, “Memphis Tennessee” was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he’s split up with her mother. That’s something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry’s own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry’s eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he’d had since summer 1958 — “Nadine” made number 23, “You Never Can Tell” made number fourteen, and “No Particular Place to Go”, a rewrite of “School Day”, with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “No Particular Place to Go”] Those songs were better than anything he’d released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry’s studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, “My Ding-a-Ling”, which if you’ve not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be — he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called “Chuck”, which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn’t released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said “if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry”, and for both better and worse, that’s probably true.

  Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists -- part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell's research. The information on the precursors to the "Johnny B. Goode" intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum.  And for information about Freed, I used  Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week's, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that's likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you'll be OK, or come back next week. Today we're going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there'd been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That's what an important record "Johnny B. Goode" is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he'd just released "School Day", which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry's career didn't go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, "Oh Baby Doll", was a comparative flop -- it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll's premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about "these rhythm and blues", this time he was going to use the music's new name, and he was singing "just let me hear some of that rock and roll music": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Rock and Roll Music"] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn't have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, "Reelin' and Rockin'", was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, "Round the Clock Blues". Harris' song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis' band, was an inspiration for "Rock Around the Clock" among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, "Round the Clock Blues"] Berry's version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content -- though that would later come back in live performances of the song -- and played up the song's similarity to "Rock Around the Clock", but it's still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry's name -- for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry's songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin' and Rockin'”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry's earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I've seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I'm going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry's regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he's playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry's last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called "ripping" when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis' records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry's new records. Johnson didn't like the sound, which he considered "all flash and no technique", but Chess insisted -- to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he "'bout tore my thumbnail off" getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin' and Rockin'”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though -- simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session -- this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Sweet Little Sixteen"] "Sweet Little Sixteen" was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course -- things like "Drugstore Rock & Roll" or "Rip it Up" -- but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It's not completely about that, sadly -- it's the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it's also about how "everybody wants to dance with" this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her "tight dresses and lipstick" -- but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it's one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby -- not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about "Sweet Little Sixteen" is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they'll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to "on Bandstand" and "in Philadelphia PA", which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It's a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry's mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for "Reelin' and Rockin'" and "Sweet Little Sixteen", came another session for what would become Berry's most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It's instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to "Johnny B. Goode" is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode"] But that guitar part has a long history -- it's original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it's based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan's guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan's "Ain't That Just Like a Woman": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Ain't That Just Like a Woman"] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song "Bluin' the Blues", you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra, "Bluin' the Blues"] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Got the Blues", in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] In Blind Blake's "Too Tight", also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Too Tight"] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan's playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Ain't That Just Like a Woman"] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode"] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he's playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, "Shufflin' the Blues"] Berry took Walker's playing style, and combined it with Hogan's note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician's toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to "Fun, Fun, Fun": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Fun Fun Fun"] Absolutely no-one listening thought "Oh, he's riffing off 'Texas Shout' by Cow Cow Davenport" -- everyone instantly thought "Oh, that's the intro to 'Johnny B. Goode'". Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician's toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying "Johnnie, be good", stop drinking so much -- a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him -- something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing "a country boy", he sang "a coloured boy". But there's another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that's in the very title itself. Goode is spelled "G-o-o-d-e", with an "e" on the end -- and Berry's childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There's another possible origin as well -- the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called "Berry", about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in "Berry" rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of "Johnny B. Goode" and say "well, this came from there, and this came from there", but still you're no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it's the combination of all these elements in a way that they'd never been put together before that is Berry's genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. "Johnny B. Goode" was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed's final film -- a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed's co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I've mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn't mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed's career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career -- rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn't have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed's downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They'd forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen -- the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said "It looks like the Boston police don't want you to have a good time." The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed -- so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they'd been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn't end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he'd been hired, the station was losing money, and he'd been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn't need to take risks, and they'd been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed's contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we've talked about before -- record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like "Maybellene" and "Sincerely" – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much -- Dick Clark certainly did -- and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what -- this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn't like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it's just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It's an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis' own underage sex scandal -- well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He'd promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry's case than in Lewis', because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men -- indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it's not like this was an isolated incident -- he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race -- and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks -- it's still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I'm not going to spend much more time on this with Berry -- not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week -- and that's because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there's a myth that Berry's career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn't true. It's true that "Johnny B. Goode" was Berry's last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He'd released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like "Thirty Days", "Too Much Monkey Business", "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "You Can't Catch Me" had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn't end up going to jail until 1961. "Johnny B. Goode" came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there's a simple reason why Berry didn't chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists -- and all artists in the fifties were singles artists -- who can survive a major change in the public's taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after "Johnny B. Goode" wasn't his best. There were some good songs -- things like "Carol", "Little Queenie", and "I've Got to Find My Baby" -- but even those weren't Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like "Anthony Boy" and "Too Pooped to Pop", which very few of even Berry's most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception -- during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, "Memphis, Tennessee": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Memphis, Tennessee"] While it's a travesty that that record didn't chart, in retrospect it's easy to see why it didn't. Berry's audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, "Memphis Tennessee" was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he's split up with her mother. That's something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry's own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry's eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he'd had since summer 1958 -- "Nadine" made number 23, "You Never Can Tell" made number fourteen, and "No Particular Place to Go", a rewrite of "School Day", with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "No Particular Place to Go"] Those songs were better than anything he'd released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry's studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, "My Ding-a-Ling", which if you've not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be -- he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called "Chuck", which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn't released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said "if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry", and for both better and worse, that's probably true.

  Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell’s research. The information on the precursors to the “Johnny B. Goode” intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum.  And for information about Freed, I used  Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week’s, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that’s likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you’ll be OK, or come back next week. Today we’re going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there’d been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That’s what an important record “Johnny B. Goode” is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he’d just released “School Day”, which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry’s career didn’t go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, “Oh Baby Doll”, was a comparative flop — it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll’s premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about “these rhythm and blues”, this time he was going to use the music’s new name, and he was singing “just let me hear some of that rock and roll music”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn’t have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, “Reelin’ and Rockin'”, was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, “Round the Clock Blues”. Harris’ song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis’ band, was an inspiration for “Rock Around the Clock” among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Round the Clock Blues”] Berry’s version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content — though that would later come back in live performances of the song — and played up the song’s similarity to “Rock Around the Clock”, but it’s still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry’s name — for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry’s songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry’s earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I’ve seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I’m going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he’s playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry’s last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called “ripping” when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis’ records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry’s new records. Johnson didn’t like the sound, which he considered “all flash and no technique”, but Chess insisted — to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he “’bout tore my thumbnail off” getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though — simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session — this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] “Sweet Little Sixteen” was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course — things like “Drugstore Rock & Roll” or “Rip it Up” — but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It’s not completely about that, sadly — it’s the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it’s also about how “everybody wants to dance with” this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her “tight dresses and lipstick” — but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it’s one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby — not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about “Sweet Little Sixteen” is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they’ll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to “on Bandstand” and “in Philadelphia PA”, which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It’s a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry’s mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for “Reelin’ and Rockin'” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, came another session for what would become Berry’s most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It’s instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to “Johnny B. Goode” is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] But that guitar part has a long history — it’s original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it’s based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan’s guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song “Bluin’ the Blues”, you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra, “Bluin’ the Blues”] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Got the Blues”, in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Got the Blues”] In Blind Blake’s “Too Tight”, also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Too Tight”] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan’s playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he’s playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, “Shufflin’ the Blues”] Berry took Walker’s playing style, and combined it with Hogan’s note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician’s toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to “Fun, Fun, Fun”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] Absolutely no-one listening thought “Oh, he’s riffing off ‘Texas Shout’ by Cow Cow Davenport” — everyone instantly thought “Oh, that’s the intro to ‘Johnny B. Goode'”. Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician’s toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying “Johnnie, be good”, stop drinking so much — a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him — something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing “a country boy”, he sang “a coloured boy”. But there’s another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that’s in the very title itself. Goode is spelled “G-o-o-d-e”, with an “e” on the end — and Berry’s childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There’s another possible origin as well — the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called “Berry”, about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in “Berry” rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of “Johnny B. Goode” and say “well, this came from there, and this came from there”, but still you’re no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it’s the combination of all these elements in a way that they’d never been put together before that is Berry’s genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. “Johnny B. Goode” was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed’s final film — a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed’s co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I’ve mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn’t mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed’s career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career — rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn’t have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed’s downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They’d forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen — the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said “It looks like the Boston police don’t want you to have a good time.” The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed — so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they’d been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn’t end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he’d been hired, the station was losing money, and he’d been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn’t need to take risks, and they’d been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed’s contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we’ve talked about before — record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like “Maybellene” and “Sincerely” – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much — Dick Clark certainly did — and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what — this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn’t like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it’s just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It’s an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis’ own underage sex scandal — well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He’d promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry’s case than in Lewis’, because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men — indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s not like this was an isolated incident — he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race — and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks — it’s still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I’m not going to spend much more time on this with Berry — not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week — and that’s because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there’s a myth that Berry’s career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn’t true. It’s true that “Johnny B. Goode” was Berry’s last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He’d released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like “Thirty Days”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “You Can’t Catch Me” had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn’t end up going to jail until 1961. “Johnny B. Goode” came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there’s a simple reason why Berry didn’t chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists — and all artists in the fifties were singles artists — who can survive a major change in the public’s taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t his best. There were some good songs — things like “Carol”, “Little Queenie”, and “I’ve Got to Find My Baby” — but even those weren’t Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like “Anthony Boy” and “Too Pooped to Pop”, which very few of even Berry’s most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception — during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, “Memphis, Tennessee”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Memphis, Tennessee”] While it’s a travesty that that record didn’t chart, in retrospect it’s easy to see why it didn’t. Berry’s audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, “Memphis Tennessee” was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he’s split up with her mother. That’s something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry’s own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry’s eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he’d had since summer 1958 — “Nadine” made number 23, “You Never Can Tell” made number fourteen, and “No Particular Place to Go”, a rewrite of “School Day”, with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “No Particular Place to Go”] Those songs were better than anything he’d released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry’s studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, “My Ding-a-Ling”, which if you’ve not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be — he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called “Chuck”, which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn’t released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said “if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry”, and for both better and worse, that’s probably true.

Too Much Monkey Business. Schiff's Groundhog Impeachment Summarium. Team Trump's Six-Point Defense. Crisply rendered. Setting the record straight on Jason Crow's struggles with the facts. Colorado's own Impeachment Manager Crow gets calmly and professionally dismantled by Trump Attorney Jay Sekulow. Meanwhile, Socialist Bernie Sanders pulls ahead in Iowa and New Hampshire. Panic from the Democratic Establishment. Warren, Hillary and Obama all pile on Poor Bernie. As does Norah O'Donnel of CBS, who blasts Sanders for not knowing how much all his Free Stuff Socialism actually costs. Kleptocrat Biden still hanging on. Democrats in quite the pickle for 2020. The Bowl of Cold Oatmeal. Wild World. A Way to Survive. I'm Only Sleeping. With Listener Calls & Music via The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Jerry Reed, Jamey Johnson, Cat Stevens, Chris Cornell and Redd Volkaert. 

Playlist: Travelin’ Blue Kings, Wired Up,Jangling Sparrows, Caroline,Tinsley Ellis, Last One To Know,Pierce Dipner And The Shades Of Blue, Roamin’ Woman,Junior Watson feat. Alabama Mike, A Shot In The Dark,Duke Robillard And His Dames Of vRhythm, Walking Stick,“Big” Al Dorn & the Blues Howlers, Straighten Up My Act,The Jimmys, She Gotta Have It,Kern Pratt, Hard Working Man,Fred Hostetler, Shelter From The Storm,The Lee Boys, I’ll Take You There,The Sherman Holmes Project, Green River,Andrew “Jr. Boy” Jones & Kerrie Lepai Jones, Don’t Mess With Me, Georgia Randall, Drive-In Fantasy,Val Starr & The Blues Rocket, Sactown Heat,Wildmen Blues Band, When The Day Ends,Thorbjorn Risager & The Black Tornado, I’ll Be Gone,Betty Fox Band, Sweet Memories,Frank Bey, Never No More,Tomislav Goluban, Country Bag,Joanna Connor, Since I Fell For You,The Forevers, Rockets Fly,Sugar Blue, Man Like Me,Bywater Call, Over And Over,Black Cat Bones, Just Around The Corner,11 Guys Quartet, Doggin’ It,Tom Baker, Pushin’ You Away,Toronzo Cannon, The Chicago Way,Rick Estrin & The Nightcats, Nothing But Love,Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Outside Of This Town,Lurrie Bell, Drifting,Kim Wilson, Edgier,Mike Zito feat. Luther Dickinson, Too Much Monkey Business,Sweet Daddy Cool Breeze, Sweet Tooth Mama,Balkun Brothers, New Rocket,Neal & The Vipers, Looking Back,Mojomatics, Soy BabyMany Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media, Mark Platt @RadioCandy.com and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area:  Crystal Bees: Friday, “Satisfaction/The International Rolling Stones Show;” Saturday, Winter Blues n Brews; Southington. Infinity Music Hall: Friday, Albert Lee; Saturday, Martin Sexton; Norfolk. The Mohegan Sun (Wolf Den): Saturday, G. Love and Special Sauce; Uncasville. (888) 226-7711 Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center: Saturday, Tusk; Sunday, Tusk; Old Saybrook. (860)-510-0473 Black-eyed Sally's: Friday, Neal Vitullo & the Vipers; Fat Tuesday: Mardi Gras Madness; Hartford. (860) 278 7427 Note Kitchen & Bar: Friday, Bone Dry Duo; Bethel. The Acoustic Café: Saturday, Matt McNulty & Friends presents “The Sunlight Splatter”; Bridgeport. (203)-335-3655 The Hideaway: Friday, Two Shots of Blue; Saturday, Otis and the Hurricanes; Ridgefield. The Ridgefield Playhouse: Saturday, Brandon “Taz” Niederauer; Ridgefield. (203) 438-5795 Grey Goose: Friday, FAKE ID; Southport. BRYAC: Friday, Special Guest Live; Bridgeport. Coalhouse Pizza: Friday, Jake Kulak & the LowDown; Stamford. Long Ridge Tavern: Friday, Kim & The Other Ones; Stamford. Peaches On the Waterfront: Saturday, Light Warriors at Peaches; Norwalk. Redding Roadhouse: Friday, Shawn Taylor; Redding. (203) 938-3388 Bill's Seafood: Saturday, Center Line; Westbrook. The Baci Grill: Friday, Steve Polezonis Trio; Cromwell. Steady Habit Brewing Co: Sunday, Dan Stevens w/ the Other Cats (2 pm, tent); Higganum. Two Wrasslin' Cats Coffee House:  Saturday, Terri and Rob Duo; East Haddam. Best Video: Saturday, The Sawtelles / Robert Zott; Thursday, Black Lodge Quartet; Hamden. Café 9: Monday, Blues Note Mondays: Brandon Terzakis Trio; New Haven. (203)-789-8281 College Street Music Hall: Tuesday, Grace Potter /Devon Gilfillian; New Haven. Donahue’s: Sunday, Jenny and Her Barrel House Boys (4:30 pm); Madison. The Stand: Friday, Langley Brother's w/Rob Glassman; Branford. Lenny's Indian Head Inn: Sunday, Rubber Band (1 pm); Branford. The Brass Horse Café: Friday, Vitamin B-3; Sunday, Sara Ashleigh Band (3 pm); Barkhamsted. The Painted Pony: Friday, The Boogie Boys; Bethlehem. Veracious Brewing: Saturday, Orb Mellon Trio; Monroe.  (203) 880-5670 Cambridge Brew House: Saturday, Liviu Pop & Friends; Granby.  860-653-2738 The Hungry Tiger: Friday, Alex Forest (6 pm); Friday, Hannah's Field; Saturday, Josh Scussell Band (6 pm); Manchester. (860) 649-1195 Maple Tree Café: Friday, Chris Zemba Band; Simsbury. Sherman's Taphouse: Friday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic; Southington. Taprock: Friday, Center Line; Unionville. Arch 2 Sports Bar and Grill: Friday, Screamin Eagle Band; Rocky Hill. Ideal Tavern: Thursday, Dan Stevens; Southington. Bristol Sports Bar & Grille: Saturday, Jr Krauss and the Shakes; Bristol. Mona Lisa Restaurant: Friday, Lori and The Legends; Wolcott. Horatio's Bar: Saturday, Eran Troy Danner, solo acoustic; Watertown. Cuppy's: Friday, Howie (Eldridge) & The Soul Potatoes w/Paul Gabriel; Shelton. Hook Line and Sinker: Saturday, Howie (Eldridge) & The Soul Potatoes w/Paul Gabriel; Shelton. Retro Grub And Pub:  Saturday, Screamin’ Eagle Band; Derby. Daddy Jack’s: Saturday, Dr. G and the Believers; New London. The Steak Loft: Thursday, Kosher Kid; Mystic. (860)-536-2661 Sneekers Café: Friday, F & Blues Band; Groton. Rocks 21: Friday, Sue Menhart, solo acoustic; Mystic. VFW: Saturday, F & Blues Band (5 pm); Preston. Daryl's House: Tuesday, Richard Thompson; Wednesday, Lurrie Bell Band; Pawling, NY  (845) 289-0185 The Falcon: Saturday, Cindy Cashdollar & The Syncopators w/Guest Opener: Arlen Roth; Marlboro, NY. Towne Crier Café: Friday, Elza with Jeff Eyrich on the Salon Stage; Friday, Buffalo Stack; Saturday, Dan Zlotnick on the Salon Stage; Beacon, NY Theodores': Saturday, Cold Shot; Tuesday, Gerry Moss; Springfield. (413) 736-6000 The Knickerbocker Café: ; Westerly. (401) 315-5070 The Met: Saturday, Satisfaction: The International Rolling Stones Tribute Show: "Paint It Back - the History of the Rolling Stones;" Pawtucket, RI The Southwick Inn: Friday Cobalt Express; Southwick, MA Chatham Brewing: Saturday, Wandering Roots w/Shawn Taylor; Chatham, NY Quinn's Irish Pub: Saturday, Professor Harp; Pawtucket, RI Knox Trail Inn: Saturday, Six Pack of Blues;  East Otis, MA (413) 269-4400 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055

Just over a decade before his ‘Lost Weekend’ in L.A., John had a full dress rehearsal during The Beatles’ third stint in Hamburg. It was April 1962, his friend and former bandmate Stu Sutcliffe had just died from a brain hemorrhage at age 21 and Lennon went off the rails – much as he would after separating from Yoko in ’73. Some episodes have acquired mythical status – and been embellished courtesy of numerous retellings. Yet, the truth still outstrips the legend. Here was Lennon unleashed – Lennon the rocker, Lennon the madman, onstage and off, dealing with grief and loss in his habitually loving, cruel, hilarious, hysterical, sometimes violent way. And helping us to paint that multicoloured, multilayered picture is Mark Lewisohn, reading passages from his unrivalled The Beatles: All These Years – Tune In. The music: Too Much Monkey Business I’m Talking About You I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You) I Just Don’t Understand A Shot of Rhythm and Blues Ain’t She Sweet Lonesome Tears in My Eyes I Got a Woman Soldier of Love Sweet Little Sixteen You should’a been there!

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr.. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used two main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  When we left Chuck Berry, he had just recorded and released his third single, “Roll Over Beethoven”, the single which had established him as the preeminent mythologiser of rock and roll. Today, we’re going to talk about the single that came after that, both sides of which were recorded at the same session as “Beethoven”. Specifically, we’re going to talk about a single that is as close as Berry got to being outright political. While these days, both sides of his next single — “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” — are considered rock and roll classics, neither hit the pop charts in 1956 when they were released. That’s because, although they might not seem it at first glance now, both songs are tied in to a very different culture from the white teen one that was now dominating the rock and roll audience. To see why, we have to look at the R&B tradition which Berry grew up in, and in particular we want to look once again at the work of Berry’s hero Louis Jordan, and the particular type of entertainment he provided. You see, while Louis Jordan was a huge star, and had a certain amount of crossover appeal to the white audience, he was someone whose biggest audience was black people, and in particular black adults. The teenager as a separate audience for music didn’t really become a thing in a conscious way until the mid-fifties. Before the rise of the doo-wop groups, R&B music, and the jump band music before it, had been aimed at a hard-working, hard-partying, adult audience, and at a defiantly working-class audience at that — one that had a hard life, and whose reality involved cheating partners, grasping landlords, angry bosses, and a large amount of drinking when they weren’t dealing with those things. But one mistake that’s always made when talking about marginalised people is to equate poverty or being a member of a racial minority with being unsophisticated. And there was a whole seam of complex, clever, ironic humour that shows up throughout the work of the jump band and early R&B musicians — one that is very different from the cornball humour that was standard in both country music and white pop. That style of humour is often referred to as “hip” or “hep” humour, and the early master of it was probably Cab Calloway, who was also the author of a “hepster’s dictionary” which remained for many years the most important source for understanding black slang of the twenties through forties. Calloway also sang about it: [Excerpt: “Jive: Page One of the Hepster’s Dictionary”, Cab Calloway] This style of humour, specific to the experiences of black people, was also the basis of much of Louis Jordan’s work – and Jordan was clearly influenced by Calloway. You only have to look at songs like “Open the Door Richard”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Open the Door Richard”] Or “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again?)”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again)?”] Obviously the experience of being drunk is one that people of all races have had, but the language used there, the specific word choices, roots Jordan’s work very firmly in the African-American cultural experience. Jordan did, of course, have a white audience, but he got that audience without compromising the blackness of his language and humour. That humour disappears almost totally from the history of rock music when the white people start showing up, and there are only two exceptions to this. There are the Coasters, whose lyrics by Jerry Leiber manage to perfectly capture that cynical adult humour of the old-style jump bands, even when dealing with teenage frustrations rather than adult ones — and we’ll look at how successfully they do that in a few weeks’ time. The other exception is, of course, Chuck Berry, who would repeatedly cite Jordan as his single biggest influence. As we continue through Berry’s career we will see time and again how things that appear original to him are actually Berry’s take on something Louis Jordan did. Berry would later manage to couple Jordan’s style of humour to the adolescent topics of school, dancing, cars, and unrequited love, rather than to the more adult topics of jobs, sex, drinking, and rent. But, crucially, at the time we’re looking at, he was not yet doing so. At the session in April 1956 which produced “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Drifting Heart”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, there were still relatively few signs that Berry was appealing to a white adolescent audience. “Very few signs” does not, of course, mean that there were no signs — Berry would have been able to see who it was who was turning up to his live performances — but it seems to have taken him some time to adapt his songwriting to his new audience. Even “Roll Over Beethoven”, which was, after all, a song very specifically aimed at mythologising the new music, had referred to “these rhythm and blues” rather than to rock and roll. Berry was almost thirty, and he was still in a mindset of writing songs for people his own age, for the audiences that had come to see him play small clubs in St. Louis. Indeed, the record industry as a whole still saw the teenage audience as almost an irrelevance – other than Bill Haley and Alan Freed, very few people really realised how big that audience was. The combination of disposable income and the changes in technology that had led to the transistor radio and the 45rpm single meant that for the first time teenagers were buying their own records, and listening to them on their own portable radios and record players, rather than having to listen to whatever their parents were buying. 1956 was the year that this new factor stopped being ignorable, and Berry would become the poet laureate of teenage America, the person who more than anyone else would create the vocabulary which would be used by everyone who followed to write about the music and the interests of white teenagers. But at this point, Berry’s music was very much not that, and both “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” address very, very, adult concerns. “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, in particular, loses a lot of its context when heard today, but is an explicitly racialised song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry Combo, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”] Now, it’s worth looking at that opening verse in some detail — “arrested on charges of unemployment” is, first of all, a funny line, but it’s *also* very much the kind of trumped-up charge that black people, especially black men, would be arrested and tried for. And then we have the judge’s wife getting the man freed because he’s so attractive. This is a very, very, common motif in black folklore and blues mythology. For example, in “Back Door Man”, written by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf and released on Chess a few years after the time we’re talking about, we have the following verse: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Back Door Man”] This is a hugely common theme in the blues — you hear it in various versions of “Stagger Lee”, for example. Later this would become, thanks to these blues songs, a staple of rock and pop music too — you get the same thing in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by the Beatles, or Frank Zappa’s “The Illinois Enema Bandit”, but stripped of its original context, both those songs have a reputation, at least partly deserved, for tastelessness and misogyny. But when this motif first came to prominence, it had a very pointed message. There is a terrible stereotype of black men as being more animal than man, and of both having insatiable sexual appetites and being irresistible to white women. This is, of course, no more true of black men than it is of any other demographic, but it was used to fuel very real moral panics about black men raping white women, which led to many men being lynched. The trope of the women screaming out for the man to be set free, in this context, is very, very, pointed, and is owning this literally deadly negative stereotype and turning it into something to boast about. And then there’s this verse: [Excerpt: “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, Chuck Berry Combo] Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play for a major league baseball team, had only started playing for the Dodgers in 1947, and was still playing when Berry recorded this. Robinson was a massively influential figure in black culture, and right from the start of his career, he was having records made about him, like this one by Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”] It’s almost impossible to state how important Jackie Robinson was to black culture in the immediate post-war period. He was a huge example of a black man breaking a colour barrier, and not only that but excelling and beating all the white people in the field. Robinson was probably the single most important figurehead for civil rights in the late forties and early fifties, even though he was — at least in his public statements — far more interested in his ability to play the game than he was in his ability to affect the course of American politics. While obviously Robinson isn’t mentioned by name in Berry’s lyric, the description of the baseball player is clearly meant to evoke Robinson’s image. None of the men mentioned in the song lyric are specifically stated to be black, just “brown-eyed” — though there are often claims, which I’ve never seen properly substantiated, that the original lyric was “brown-skinned handsome man”. That does, though, fit with Berry’s repeated tendency to slightly tone down politically controversial aspects of his lyrics – “Johnny B Goode” originally featured a “coloured boy” rather than a “country boy”, and in “Nadine” he was originally “campaign shouting like a Southern Democrat” rather than a “Southern diplomat”. But while the men are described in the song in deliberately ambiguous terms, the whole song is very much centred around images from black culture, and images of black men, and especially black men in contexts of white culture, usually high culture, from which they would normally be barred. Much as his idol Jordan had done earlier, Berry is repackaging black culture in a way that is relatable by a white audience, while not compromising that culture in any real way. The flip side of “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” is also interesting. “Too Much Monkey Business” is much more directly inspired by Jordan, but is less obviously rooted in specific black experiences. But at the same time, it is absolutely geared to adult concerns, rather than those of teenagers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Too Much Monkey Business”] Well, at least six of the seven verses dealt with adult concerns. Over the seven verses, Berry complains about working for the US mail and getting bills, being given the hard sell by a salesman, having a woman want him to settle down with her and get married, having to go to school every day, using a broken payphone, fighting in the war, and working in a petrol station. With the exception of the verse about going to school, these are far more the concerns of Louis Jordan, and of records like the Drifters’ “Money Honey” or the records Johnny Otis was making, than they are of the new white teenage audience. While both “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” made the top five on the R&B chart, they didn’t hit the pop top forty — and “Roll Over Beethoven” had only just scraped into the top thirty. It was plain that if Berry wanted to repeat the success of “Maybellene”, he would have to pivot towards a new audience. He couldn’t make any more records aimed at black adults. He needed to start making records aimed at white children. That wasn’t the only change he made. The “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” single was the last one to be released under the name “the Chuck Berry Combo”. There are at least two different stories about how Berry stopped working with Ebby Hardy and Johnnie Johnson. Berry always claimed that his two band members were getting drunk all the time and not capable of playing properly. Johnson, on the other hand, always said instead that the two of them got tired of all the travelling and just wanted to stay in St. Louis. Johnson would continue to play piano on many of Berry’s recordings — though from this point on he would never be the sole pianist for Berry, as many sources wrongly claim he was. From now on, Chuck Berry was a solo artist. The first fruit of this newfound solo stardom was Berry’s first film appearance. Rock! Rock! Rock! is one of the more widely-available rock and roll films now, thanks to it having entered into the public domain — you can actually even watch the film through its Wikipedia page, which I’ll link in the show notes. It’s not, though, a film I’d actually recommend watching at all. The plot, such as it is, consists of Tuesday Weld wanting to buy a new dress for the prom, and her dad not wanting to give her the money, and an “evil” rival for Weld’s boyfriend’s attentions (who you can tell is evil because she has dark hair rather than being blonde like Weld) trying to get her in trouble. You get something of an idea of the quality of the film by the fact that its writer was also its producer, who was also the composer of the incidental music and the title song: [Excerpt: “Rock Rock Rock”, Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers] That was co-written by Milton Subotsky, the film’s producer, who would go on to much better and more interesting things as the co-founder of Amicus Films, a British film company that made a whole host of cheap but enjoyable horror and science fiction films. Oddly enough, we’ll be meeting Subotsky again. How important the plot is can be summed up by the fact that there is a fifteen-minute sequence in this seventy-minute film, in which Weld and her friend merely watch the TV. The programme they’re watching is a fictional TV show, presented by Alan Freed, in which he introduces various rock and roll acts, and this is where Berry appears. The song he’s singing in the film is his next single, “You Can’t Catch Me”, which had actually been recorded before “Roll Over Beethoven”. But the story of the song’s release is one that tells you a lot about the music business in the 1950s, and about how little the artists understood about what it was they were getting into. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry: “You Can’t Catch Me”] As we discussed last week when talking about Fats Domino, it wasn’t normal for R&B acts to put out albums, and so it was a sign of how much the film was aimed at the white teenage audience that a soundtrack album was considered at all. It seems to have been Alan Freed’s idea. Freed was the star of the film, and the acts in it — people like Lavern Baker, the Moonglows, Johnny Burnette, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers — were for the most part people he regularly featured on his radio show (along with a handful of bland white novelty acts that were included in the misguided belief that the teenage audience wanted to hear a pre-teen kid singing about rock and roll). But of course, Freed being Freed, what that meant was that the acts he included were from record labels that would bribe him, or with which he had some kind of financial relationship, and as they were on multiple different labels, this caused problems when deciding who got to put out a soundtrack album. In particular, both the Chess brothers, whose labels had provided the Flamingos, the Moonglows, and Berry, and Morris Levy, the gangster who controlled the career of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the single biggest act in the film, wanted the right to put out a soundtrack album and profit from the publicity the film would provide. All of them were “business associates” of Freed — Freed managed the Moonglows, and had been given writing credit on songs by both the Moonglows and Berry in return for playing them on his radio show, while Levy was himself Freed’s manager, and had been largely responsible for getting Freed his unchallenged dominance of New York radio. So they came to a compromise. The soundtrack album would only feature the three Chess acts who appeared in the film, and would include four songs by each of them, rather than the one song each they performed in the film. And the album would be out on Chess. But the album would include the previously-released songs that Freed was credited with co-writing, and the new songs would be published, not by the publishing companies that published those artists’ songs, but by one of Levy’s companies. Chuck Berry was tricked into signing his rights to the song away by a standard Leonard Chess tactic — he was called into Chess’ office to receive a large royalty cheque, and Chess asked him if while he was there he would mind signing this other document that needed signing, only could he do it in a hurry, because Chess had an urgent appointment? It was six months until Berry realised that he’d signed away the rights to “You Can’t Catch Me”, and twenty-eight years before he was able to reclaim the copyright for himself. In the meantime, the rights to that one Chuck Berry song made Levy far more money than he could possibly have expected, because of this one line: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “You Can’t Catch Me”] In 1969, John Lennon took that line and used it as the opening line for the Beatles song “Come Together”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Come Together”] Rather than go through the courts, Levy and Lennon came to an agreement — Lennon was going to make an album of rock and roll covers, and he would include at least three songs to which Levy owned the copyright, including “You Can’t Catch Me”. As a result, even after Levy finally lost the rights to the song in the early 1980s, he still continued earning money from John Lennon’s cover versions of two other songs he owned, which would never have been recorded without him having owned “You Can’t Catch Me”. “You Can’t Catch Me” was a flop, and didn’t even make the R&B charts, let alone the pop charts. This even though its B-side, “Havana Moon”, would in a roundabout way end up being Berry’s most influential song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Havana Moon”] We’ll talk about just how influential that song was in a year or so… Berry knew he had to pivot, and fast. He wrote a new song, “Rock and Roll Music”, which he thought could maybe have the same kind of success as “Roll Over Beethoven”, but used the more currently-popular term rock and roll rather than talking about “rhythm and blues” as the earlier song did. But while he demoed that, it wasn’t a song that he could be certain would directly get right into the head of every teenage kid in America. For that, he turned to Johnnie Johnson again. For years, Johnson had had his own theme song at the Cosmopolitan Club. In its original form the song was based on “Honky Tonk Train Blues” by Meade “Lux” Lewis: [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] Johnson’s own take on the song had kept Lewis’ intro, and had been renamed “Johnnie’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnnie’s Boogie”] Johnson suggested to Berry that they take that intro and have Berry play the same thing, but on the guitar. When he did, they found that when he played his guitar, it was like ringing a bell — a school bell, to be precise. And that gave Berry the idea for the lyric: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” was the pivot point, the song with which Chuck Berry turned wholly towards teenage concerns, and away from those of adults. The description of the drudgery of life in school was not that different from the descriptions of working life in “Too Much Monkey Business”, but it was infinitely more relatable to the new young rock and roll audience than anything in the earlier song. And not only that, the slow trudge of school life gets replaced, in the final verses, with an anthem to the new music: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” became the biggest-selling single ever to be released by Chess to that point. It hit number one on the R&B charts, knocking “All Shook Up” by Elvis off the top, and made number five on the Billboard pop charts. It charted in the UK, which given Chess’ lack of distribution over here at that point was a minor miracle, and it stayed on the Billboard pop chart for an astonishing six months. “School Day” was successful enough that Berry was given an album release of his own. “After School Session” was a compilation of tracks Berry had released as either the A- or B-sides of singles, including “School Day”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Havana Moon”, but not including “You Can’t Catch Me” or the other songs on the “Rock Rock Rock” compilation. It was filled out with a couple of generic blues instrumentals, but was otherwise a perfect representation of where Berry was artistically, right at this turning point. And that shows even in the title of the record. The name “After School Session” obviously refers to “School Day”, and to the kids in the song going to listen to rock and roll after school ended, but it was also a tip of the hat to another song, one which may have inspired the lyrics to “School Day” in much the same way that Meade “Lux” Lewis had inspired the music: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “After School Swing Session (Swinging With Symphony Sid)”] Even at his most up-to-date, Chuck Berry was still paying homage to Louis Jordan. “School Day” was the point where Chuck Berry went from middling rhythm and blues star to major rock and roll star, and his next twelve records would all make the Billboard pop charts. 1957 was going to be Chuck Berry’s year, and we’ll hear how in a few weeks time, when we look at another Louis Jordan influenced song, about a kid who played the guitar…

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr.. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used two main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  When we left Chuck Berry, he had just recorded and released his third single, “Roll Over Beethoven”, the single which had established him as the preeminent mythologiser of rock and roll. Today, we’re going to talk about the single that came after that, both sides of which were recorded at the same session as “Beethoven”. Specifically, we’re going to talk about a single that is as close as Berry got to being outright political. While these days, both sides of his next single — “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” — are considered rock and roll classics, neither hit the pop charts in 1956 when they were released. That’s because, although they might not seem it at first glance now, both songs are tied in to a very different culture from the white teen one that was now dominating the rock and roll audience. To see why, we have to look at the R&B tradition which Berry grew up in, and in particular we want to look once again at the work of Berry’s hero Louis Jordan, and the particular type of entertainment he provided. You see, while Louis Jordan was a huge star, and had a certain amount of crossover appeal to the white audience, he was someone whose biggest audience was black people, and in particular black adults. The teenager as a separate audience for music didn’t really become a thing in a conscious way until the mid-fifties. Before the rise of the doo-wop groups, R&B music, and the jump band music before it, had been aimed at a hard-working, hard-partying, adult audience, and at a defiantly working-class audience at that — one that had a hard life, and whose reality involved cheating partners, grasping landlords, angry bosses, and a large amount of drinking when they weren’t dealing with those things. But one mistake that’s always made when talking about marginalised people is to equate poverty or being a member of a racial minority with being unsophisticated. And there was a whole seam of complex, clever, ironic humour that shows up throughout the work of the jump band and early R&B musicians — one that is very different from the cornball humour that was standard in both country music and white pop. That style of humour is often referred to as “hip” or “hep” humour, and the early master of it was probably Cab Calloway, who was also the author of a “hepster’s dictionary” which remained for many years the most important source for understanding black slang of the twenties through forties. Calloway also sang about it: [Excerpt: “Jive: Page One of the Hepster’s Dictionary”, Cab Calloway] This style of humour, specific to the experiences of black people, was also the basis of much of Louis Jordan’s work – and Jordan was clearly influenced by Calloway. You only have to look at songs like “Open the Door Richard”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Open the Door Richard”] Or “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again?)”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again)?”] Obviously the experience of being drunk is one that people of all races have had, but the language used there, the specific word choices, roots Jordan’s work very firmly in the African-American cultural experience. Jordan did, of course, have a white audience, but he got that audience without compromising the blackness of his language and humour. That humour disappears almost totally from the history of rock music when the white people start showing up, and there are only two exceptions to this. There are the Coasters, whose lyrics by Jerry Leiber manage to perfectly capture that cynical adult humour of the old-style jump bands, even when dealing with teenage frustrations rather than adult ones — and we’ll look at how successfully they do that in a few weeks’ time. The other exception is, of course, Chuck Berry, who would repeatedly cite Jordan as his single biggest influence. As we continue through Berry’s career we will see time and again how things that appear original to him are actually Berry’s take on something Louis Jordan did. Berry would later manage to couple Jordan’s style of humour to the adolescent topics of school, dancing, cars, and unrequited love, rather than to the more adult topics of jobs, sex, drinking, and rent. But, crucially, at the time we’re looking at, he was not yet doing so. At the session in April 1956 which produced “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Drifting Heart”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, there were still relatively few signs that Berry was appealing to a white adolescent audience. “Very few signs” does not, of course, mean that there were no signs — Berry would have been able to see who it was who was turning up to his live performances — but it seems to have taken him some time to adapt his songwriting to his new audience. Even “Roll Over Beethoven”, which was, after all, a song very specifically aimed at mythologising the new music, had referred to “these rhythm and blues” rather than to rock and roll. Berry was almost thirty, and he was still in a mindset of writing songs for people his own age, for the audiences that had come to see him play small clubs in St. Louis. Indeed, the record industry as a whole still saw the teenage audience as almost an irrelevance – other than Bill Haley and Alan Freed, very few people really realised how big that audience was. The combination of disposable income and the changes in technology that had led to the transistor radio and the 45rpm single meant that for the first time teenagers were buying their own records, and listening to them on their own portable radios and record players, rather than having to listen to whatever their parents were buying. 1956 was the year that this new factor stopped being ignorable, and Berry would become the poet laureate of teenage America, the person who more than anyone else would create the vocabulary which would be used by everyone who followed to write about the music and the interests of white teenagers. But at this point, Berry’s music was very much not that, and both “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” address very, very, adult concerns. “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, in particular, loses a lot of its context when heard today, but is an explicitly racialised song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry Combo, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”] Now, it’s worth looking at that opening verse in some detail — “arrested on charges of unemployment” is, first of all, a funny line, but it’s *also* very much the kind of trumped-up charge that black people, especially black men, would be arrested and tried for. And then we have the judge’s wife getting the man freed because he’s so attractive. This is a very, very, common motif in black folklore and blues mythology. For example, in “Back Door Man”, written by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf and released on Chess a few years after the time we’re talking about, we have the following verse: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Back Door Man”] This is a hugely common theme in the blues — you hear it in various versions of “Stagger Lee”, for example. Later this would become, thanks to these blues songs, a staple of rock and pop music too — you get the same thing in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by the Beatles, or Frank Zappa’s “The Illinois Enema Bandit”, but stripped of its original context, both those songs have a reputation, at least partly deserved, for tastelessness and misogyny. But when this motif first came to prominence, it had a very pointed message. There is a terrible stereotype of black men as being more animal than man, and of both having insatiable sexual appetites and being irresistible to white women. This is, of course, no more true of black men than it is of any other demographic, but it was used to fuel very real moral panics about black men raping white women, which led to many men being lynched. The trope of the women screaming out for the man to be set free, in this context, is very, very, pointed, and is owning this literally deadly negative stereotype and turning it into something to boast about. And then there’s this verse: [Excerpt: “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, Chuck Berry Combo] Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play for a major league baseball team, had only started playing for the Dodgers in 1947, and was still playing when Berry recorded this. Robinson was a massively influential figure in black culture, and right from the start of his career, he was having records made about him, like this one by Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”] It’s almost impossible to state how important Jackie Robinson was to black culture in the immediate post-war period. He was a huge example of a black man breaking a colour barrier, and not only that but excelling and beating all the white people in the field. Robinson was probably the single most important figurehead for civil rights in the late forties and early fifties, even though he was — at least in his public statements — far more interested in his ability to play the game than he was in his ability to affect the course of American politics. While obviously Robinson isn’t mentioned by name in Berry’s lyric, the description of the baseball player is clearly meant to evoke Robinson’s image. None of the men mentioned in the song lyric are specifically stated to be black, just “brown-eyed” — though there are often claims, which I’ve never seen properly substantiated, that the original lyric was “brown-skinned handsome man”. That does, though, fit with Berry’s repeated tendency to slightly tone down politically controversial aspects of his lyrics – “Johnny B Goode” originally featured a “coloured boy” rather than a “country boy”, and in “Nadine” he was originally “campaign shouting like a Southern Democrat” rather than a “Southern diplomat”. But while the men are described in the song in deliberately ambiguous terms, the whole song is very much centred around images from black culture, and images of black men, and especially black men in contexts of white culture, usually high culture, from which they would normally be barred. Much as his idol Jordan had done earlier, Berry is repackaging black culture in a way that is relatable by a white audience, while not compromising that culture in any real way. The flip side of “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” is also interesting. “Too Much Monkey Business” is much more directly inspired by Jordan, but is less obviously rooted in specific black experiences. But at the same time, it is absolutely geared to adult concerns, rather than those of teenagers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Too Much Monkey Business”] Well, at least six of the seven verses dealt with adult concerns. Over the seven verses, Berry complains about working for the US mail and getting bills, being given the hard sell by a salesman, having a woman want him to settle down with her and get married, having to go to school every day, using a broken payphone, fighting in the war, and working in a petrol station. With the exception of the verse about going to school, these are far more the concerns of Louis Jordan, and of records like the Drifters’ “Money Honey” or the records Johnny Otis was making, than they are of the new white teenage audience. While both “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” made the top five on the R&B chart, they didn’t hit the pop top forty — and “Roll Over Beethoven” had only just scraped into the top thirty. It was plain that if Berry wanted to repeat the success of “Maybellene”, he would have to pivot towards a new audience. He couldn’t make any more records aimed at black adults. He needed to start making records aimed at white children. That wasn’t the only change he made. The “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” single was the last one to be released under the name “the Chuck Berry Combo”. There are at least two different stories about how Berry stopped working with Ebby Hardy and Johnnie Johnson. Berry always claimed that his two band members were getting drunk all the time and not capable of playing properly. Johnson, on the other hand, always said instead that the two of them got tired of all the travelling and just wanted to stay in St. Louis. Johnson would continue to play piano on many of Berry’s recordings — though from this point on he would never be the sole pianist for Berry, as many sources wrongly claim he was. From now on, Chuck Berry was a solo artist. The first fruit of this newfound solo stardom was Berry’s first film appearance. Rock! Rock! Rock! is one of the more widely-available rock and roll films now, thanks to it having entered into the public domain — you can actually even watch the film through its Wikipedia page, which I’ll link in the show notes. It’s not, though, a film I’d actually recommend watching at all. The plot, such as it is, consists of Tuesday Weld wanting to buy a new dress for the prom, and her dad not wanting to give her the money, and an “evil” rival for Weld’s boyfriend’s attentions (who you can tell is evil because she has dark hair rather than being blonde like Weld) trying to get her in trouble. You get something of an idea of the quality of the film by the fact that its writer was also its producer, who was also the composer of the incidental music and the title song: [Excerpt: “Rock Rock Rock”, Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers] That was co-written by Milton Subotsky, the film’s producer, who would go on to much better and more interesting things as the co-founder of Amicus Films, a British film company that made a whole host of cheap but enjoyable horror and science fiction films. Oddly enough, we’ll be meeting Subotsky again. How important the plot is can be summed up by the fact that there is a fifteen-minute sequence in this seventy-minute film, in which Weld and her friend merely watch the TV. The programme they’re watching is a fictional TV show, presented by Alan Freed, in which he introduces various rock and roll acts, and this is where Berry appears. The song he’s singing in the film is his next single, “You Can’t Catch Me”, which had actually been recorded before “Roll Over Beethoven”. But the story of the song’s release is one that tells you a lot about the music business in the 1950s, and about how little the artists understood about what it was they were getting into. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry: “You Can’t Catch Me”] As we discussed last week when talking about Fats Domino, it wasn’t normal for R&B acts to put out albums, and so it was a sign of how much the film was aimed at the white teenage audience that a soundtrack album was considered at all. It seems to have been Alan Freed’s idea. Freed was the star of the film, and the acts in it — people like Lavern Baker, the Moonglows, Johnny Burnette, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers — were for the most part people he regularly featured on his radio show (along with a handful of bland white novelty acts that were included in the misguided belief that the teenage audience wanted to hear a pre-teen kid singing about rock and roll). But of course, Freed being Freed, what that meant was that the acts he included were from record labels that would bribe him, or with which he had some kind of financial relationship, and as they were on multiple different labels, this caused problems when deciding who got to put out a soundtrack album. In particular, both the Chess brothers, whose labels had provided the Flamingos, the Moonglows, and Berry, and Morris Levy, the gangster who controlled the career of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the single biggest act in the film, wanted the right to put out a soundtrack album and profit from the publicity the film would provide. All of them were “business associates” of Freed — Freed managed the Moonglows, and had been given writing credit on songs by both the Moonglows and Berry in return for playing them on his radio show, while Levy was himself Freed’s manager, and had been largely responsible for getting Freed his unchallenged dominance of New York radio. So they came to a compromise. The soundtrack album would only feature the three Chess acts who appeared in the film, and would include four songs by each of them, rather than the one song each they performed in the film. And the album would be out on Chess. But the album would include the previously-released songs that Freed was credited with co-writing, and the new songs would be published, not by the publishing companies that published those artists’ songs, but by one of Levy’s companies. Chuck Berry was tricked into signing his rights to the song away by a standard Leonard Chess tactic — he was called into Chess’ office to receive a large royalty cheque, and Chess asked him if while he was there he would mind signing this other document that needed signing, only could he do it in a hurry, because Chess had an urgent appointment? It was six months until Berry realised that he’d signed away the rights to “You Can’t Catch Me”, and twenty-eight years before he was able to reclaim the copyright for himself. In the meantime, the rights to that one Chuck Berry song made Levy far more money than he could possibly have expected, because of this one line: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “You Can’t Catch Me”] In 1969, John Lennon took that line and used it as the opening line for the Beatles song “Come Together”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Come Together”] Rather than go through the courts, Levy and Lennon came to an agreement — Lennon was going to make an album of rock and roll covers, and he would include at least three songs to which Levy owned the copyright, including “You Can’t Catch Me”. As a result, even after Levy finally lost the rights to the song in the early 1980s, he still continued earning money from John Lennon’s cover versions of two other songs he owned, which would never have been recorded without him having owned “You Can’t Catch Me”. “You Can’t Catch Me” was a flop, and didn’t even make the R&B charts, let alone the pop charts. This even though its B-side, “Havana Moon”, would in a roundabout way end up being Berry’s most influential song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Havana Moon”] We’ll talk about just how influential that song was in a year or so… Berry knew he had to pivot, and fast. He wrote a new song, “Rock and Roll Music”, which he thought could maybe have the same kind of success as “Roll Over Beethoven”, but used the more currently-popular term rock and roll rather than talking about “rhythm and blues” as the earlier song did. But while he demoed that, it wasn’t a song that he could be certain would directly get right into the head of every teenage kid in America. For that, he turned to Johnnie Johnson again. For years, Johnson had had his own theme song at the Cosmopolitan Club. In its original form the song was based on “Honky Tonk Train Blues” by Meade “Lux” Lewis: [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] Johnson’s own take on the song had kept Lewis’ intro, and had been renamed “Johnnie’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnnie’s Boogie”] Johnson suggested to Berry that they take that intro and have Berry play the same thing, but on the guitar. When he did, they found that when he played his guitar, it was like ringing a bell — a school bell, to be precise. And that gave Berry the idea for the lyric: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” was the pivot point, the song with which Chuck Berry turned wholly towards teenage concerns, and away from those of adults. The description of the drudgery of life in school was not that different from the descriptions of working life in “Too Much Monkey Business”, but it was infinitely more relatable to the new young rock and roll audience than anything in the earlier song. And not only that, the slow trudge of school life gets replaced, in the final verses, with an anthem to the new music: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” became the biggest-selling single ever to be released by Chess to that point. It hit number one on the R&B charts, knocking “All Shook Up” by Elvis off the top, and made number five on the Billboard pop charts. It charted in the UK, which given Chess’ lack of distribution over here at that point was a minor miracle, and it stayed on the Billboard pop chart for an astonishing six months. “School Day” was successful enough that Berry was given an album release of his own. “After School Session” was a compilation of tracks Berry had released as either the A- or B-sides of singles, including “School Day”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Havana Moon”, but not including “You Can’t Catch Me” or the other songs on the “Rock Rock Rock” compilation. It was filled out with a couple of generic blues instrumentals, but was otherwise a perfect representation of where Berry was artistically, right at this turning point. And that shows even in the title of the record. The name “After School Session” obviously refers to “School Day”, and to the kids in the song going to listen to rock and roll after school ended, but it was also a tip of the hat to another song, one which may have inspired the lyrics to “School Day” in much the same way that Meade “Lux” Lewis had inspired the music: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “After School Swing Session (Swinging With Symphony Sid)”] Even at his most up-to-date, Chuck Berry was still paying homage to Louis Jordan. “School Day” was the point where Chuck Berry went from middling rhythm and blues star to major rock and roll star, and his next twelve records would all make the Billboard pop charts. 1957 was going to be Chuck Berry’s year, and we’ll hear how in a few weeks time, when we look at another Louis Jordan influenced song, about a kid who played the guitar…

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rock and Roll Waltz" by Kay Starr.. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used two main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  When we left Chuck Berry, he had just recorded and released his third single, "Roll Over Beethoven", the single which had established him as the preeminent mythologiser of rock and roll. Today, we're going to talk about the single that came after that, both sides of which were recorded at the same session as "Beethoven". Specifically, we're going to talk about a single that is as close as Berry got to being outright political. While these days, both sides of his next single -- "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "Too Much Monkey Business" -- are considered rock and roll classics, neither hit the pop charts in 1956 when they were released. That's because, although they might not seem it at first glance now, both songs are tied in to a very different culture from the white teen one that was now dominating the rock and roll audience. To see why, we have to look at the R&B tradition which Berry grew up in, and in particular we want to look once again at the work of Berry's hero Louis Jordan, and the particular type of entertainment he provided. You see, while Louis Jordan was a huge star, and had a certain amount of crossover appeal to the white audience, he was someone whose biggest audience was black people, and in particular black adults. The teenager as a separate audience for music didn't really become a thing in a conscious way until the mid-fifties. Before the rise of the doo-wop groups, R&B music, and the jump band music before it, had been aimed at a hard-working, hard-partying, adult audience, and at a defiantly working-class audience at that -- one that had a hard life, and whose reality involved cheating partners, grasping landlords, angry bosses, and a large amount of drinking when they weren't dealing with those things. But one mistake that's always made when talking about marginalised people is to equate poverty or being a member of a racial minority with being unsophisticated. And there was a whole seam of complex, clever, ironic humour that shows up throughout the work of the jump band and early R&B musicians -- one that is very different from the cornball humour that was standard in both country music and white pop. That style of humour is often referred to as "hip" or "hep" humour, and the early master of it was probably Cab Calloway, who was also the author of a "hepster's dictionary" which remained for many years the most important source for understanding black slang of the twenties through forties. Calloway also sang about it: [Excerpt: "Jive: Page One of the Hepster's Dictionary", Cab Calloway] This style of humour, specific to the experiences of black people, was also the basis of much of Louis Jordan's work – and Jordan was clearly influenced by Calloway. You only have to look at songs like "Open the Door Richard": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Open the Door Richard"] Or "What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You'll Only Get Drunk Again?)": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You'll Only Get Drunk Again)?"] Obviously the experience of being drunk is one that people of all races have had, but the language used there, the specific word choices, roots Jordan's work very firmly in the African-American cultural experience. Jordan did, of course, have a white audience, but he got that audience without compromising the blackness of his language and humour. That humour disappears almost totally from the history of rock music when the white people start showing up, and there are only two exceptions to this. There are the Coasters, whose lyrics by Jerry Leiber manage to perfectly capture that cynical adult humour of the old-style jump bands, even when dealing with teenage frustrations rather than adult ones -- and we'll look at how successfully they do that in a few weeks' time. The other exception is, of course, Chuck Berry, who would repeatedly cite Jordan as his single biggest influence. As we continue through Berry's career we will see time and again how things that appear original to him are actually Berry's take on something Louis Jordan did. Berry would later manage to couple Jordan's style of humour to the adolescent topics of school, dancing, cars, and unrequited love, rather than to the more adult topics of jobs, sex, drinking, and rent. But, crucially, at the time we're looking at, he was not yet doing so. At the session in April 1956 which produced "Roll Over Beethoven", "Drifting Heart", "Too Much Monkey Business", and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", there were still relatively few signs that Berry was appealing to a white adolescent audience. "Very few signs" does not, of course, mean that there were no signs -- Berry would have been able to see who it was who was turning up to his live performances -- but it seems to have taken him some time to adapt his songwriting to his new audience. Even "Roll Over Beethoven", which was, after all, a song very specifically aimed at mythologising the new music, had referred to "these rhythm and blues" rather than to rock and roll. Berry was almost thirty, and he was still in a mindset of writing songs for people his own age, for the audiences that had come to see him play small clubs in St. Louis. Indeed, the record industry as a whole still saw the teenage audience as almost an irrelevance – other than Bill Haley and Alan Freed, very few people really realised how big that audience was. The combination of disposable income and the changes in technology that had led to the transistor radio and the 45rpm single meant that for the first time teenagers were buying their own records, and listening to them on their own portable radios and record players, rather than having to listen to whatever their parents were buying. 1956 was the year that this new factor stopped being ignorable, and Berry would become the poet laureate of teenage America, the person who more than anyone else would create the vocabulary which would be used by everyone who followed to write about the music and the interests of white teenagers. But at this point, Berry's music was very much not that, and both "Too Much Monkey Business" and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" address very, very, adult concerns. "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", in particular, loses a lot of its context when heard today, but is an explicitly racialised song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry Combo, "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man"] Now, it's worth looking at that opening verse in some detail -- "arrested on charges of unemployment" is, first of all, a funny line, but it's *also* very much the kind of trumped-up charge that black people, especially black men, would be arrested and tried for. And then we have the judge's wife getting the man freed because he's so attractive. This is a very, very, common motif in black folklore and blues mythology. For example, in "Back Door Man", written by Willie Dixon for Howlin' Wolf and released on Chess a few years after the time we're talking about, we have the following verse: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Back Door Man"] This is a hugely common theme in the blues -- you hear it in various versions of "Stagger Lee", for example. Later this would become, thanks to these blues songs, a staple of rock and pop music too -- you get the same thing in "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" by the Beatles, or Frank Zappa's "The Illinois Enema Bandit", but stripped of its original context, both those songs have a reputation, at least partly deserved, for tastelessness and misogyny. But when this motif first came to prominence, it had a very pointed message. There is a terrible stereotype of black men as being more animal than man, and of both having insatiable sexual appetites and being irresistible to white women. This is, of course, no more true of black men than it is of any other demographic, but it was used to fuel very real moral panics about black men raping white women, which led to many men being lynched. The trope of the women screaming out for the man to be set free, in this context, is very, very, pointed, and is owning this literally deadly negative stereotype and turning it into something to boast about. And then there's this verse: [Excerpt: "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", Chuck Berry Combo] Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play for a major league baseball team, had only started playing for the Dodgers in 1947, and was still playing when Berry recorded this. Robinson was a massively influential figure in black culture, and right from the start of his career, he was having records made about him, like this one by Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?"] It's almost impossible to state how important Jackie Robinson was to black culture in the immediate post-war period. He was a huge example of a black man breaking a colour barrier, and not only that but excelling and beating all the white people in the field. Robinson was probably the single most important figurehead for civil rights in the late forties and early fifties, even though he was -- at least in his public statements -- far more interested in his ability to play the game than he was in his ability to affect the course of American politics. While obviously Robinson isn't mentioned by name in Berry's lyric, the description of the baseball player is clearly meant to evoke Robinson's image. None of the men mentioned in the song lyric are specifically stated to be black, just "brown-eyed" -- though there are often claims, which I've never seen properly substantiated, that the original lyric was "brown-skinned handsome man". That does, though, fit with Berry's repeated tendency to slightly tone down politically controversial aspects of his lyrics – "Johnny B Goode" originally featured a "coloured boy" rather than a "country boy", and in "Nadine" he was originally "campaign shouting like a Southern Democrat" rather than a "Southern diplomat". But while the men are described in the song in deliberately ambiguous terms, the whole song is very much centred around images from black culture, and images of black men, and especially black men in contexts of white culture, usually high culture, from which they would normally be barred. Much as his idol Jordan had done earlier, Berry is repackaging black culture in a way that is relatable by a white audience, while not compromising that culture in any real way. The flip side of "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" is also interesting. "Too Much Monkey Business" is much more directly inspired by Jordan, but is less obviously rooted in specific black experiences. But at the same time, it is absolutely geared to adult concerns, rather than those of teenagers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] Well, at least six of the seven verses dealt with adult concerns. Over the seven verses, Berry complains about working for the US mail and getting bills, being given the hard sell by a salesman, having a woman want him to settle down with her and get married, having to go to school every day, using a broken payphone, fighting in the war, and working in a petrol station. With the exception of the verse about going to school, these are far more the concerns of Louis Jordan, and of records like the Drifters' "Money Honey" or the records Johnny Otis was making, than they are of the new white teenage audience. While both "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "Too Much Monkey Business" made the top five on the R&B chart, they didn't hit the pop top forty -- and "Roll Over Beethoven" had only just scraped into the top thirty. It was plain that if Berry wanted to repeat the success of "Maybellene", he would have to pivot towards a new audience. He couldn't make any more records aimed at black adults. He needed to start making records aimed at white children. That wasn't the only change he made. The "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" single was the last one to be released under the name "the Chuck Berry Combo". There are at least two different stories about how Berry stopped working with Ebby Hardy and Johnnie Johnson. Berry always claimed that his two band members were getting drunk all the time and not capable of playing properly. Johnson, on the other hand, always said instead that the two of them got tired of all the travelling and just wanted to stay in St. Louis. Johnson would continue to play piano on many of Berry's recordings -- though from this point on he would never be the sole pianist for Berry, as many sources wrongly claim he was. From now on, Chuck Berry was a solo artist. The first fruit of this newfound solo stardom was Berry's first film appearance. Rock! Rock! Rock! is one of the more widely-available rock and roll films now, thanks to it having entered into the public domain -- you can actually even watch the film through its Wikipedia page, which I'll link in the show notes. It's not, though, a film I'd actually recommend watching at all. The plot, such as it is, consists of Tuesday Weld wanting to buy a new dress for the prom, and her dad not wanting to give her the money, and an "evil" rival for Weld's boyfriend's attentions (who you can tell is evil because she has dark hair rather than being blonde like Weld) trying to get her in trouble. You get something of an idea of the quality of the film by the fact that its writer was also its producer, who was also the composer of the incidental music and the title song: [Excerpt: "Rock Rock Rock", Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers] That was co-written by Milton Subotsky, the film's producer, who would go on to much better and more interesting things as the co-founder of Amicus Films, a British film company that made a whole host of cheap but enjoyable horror and science fiction films. Oddly enough, we'll be meeting Subotsky again. How important the plot is can be summed up by the fact that there is a fifteen-minute sequence in this seventy-minute film, in which Weld and her friend merely watch the TV. The programme they're watching is a fictional TV show, presented by Alan Freed, in which he introduces various rock and roll acts, and this is where Berry appears. The song he's singing in the film is his next single, "You Can't Catch Me", which had actually been recorded before “Roll Over Beethoven”. But the story of the song's release is one that tells you a lot about the music business in the 1950s, and about how little the artists understood about what it was they were getting into. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry: "You Can't Catch Me"] As we discussed last week when talking about Fats Domino, it wasn't normal for R&B acts to put out albums, and so it was a sign of how much the film was aimed at the white teenage audience that a soundtrack album was considered at all. It seems to have been Alan Freed's idea. Freed was the star of the film, and the acts in it -- people like Lavern Baker, the Moonglows, Johnny Burnette, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers -- were for the most part people he regularly featured on his radio show (along with a handful of bland white novelty acts that were included in the misguided belief that the teenage audience wanted to hear a pre-teen kid singing about rock and roll). But of course, Freed being Freed, what that meant was that the acts he included were from record labels that would bribe him, or with which he had some kind of financial relationship, and as they were on multiple different labels, this caused problems when deciding who got to put out a soundtrack album. In particular, both the Chess brothers, whose labels had provided the Flamingos, the Moonglows, and Berry, and Morris Levy, the gangster who controlled the career of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the single biggest act in the film, wanted the right to put out a soundtrack album and profit from the publicity the film would provide. All of them were "business associates" of Freed -- Freed managed the Moonglows, and had been given writing credit on songs by both the Moonglows and Berry in return for playing them on his radio show, while Levy was himself Freed's manager, and had been largely responsible for getting Freed his unchallenged dominance of New York radio. So they came to a compromise. The soundtrack album would only feature the three Chess acts who appeared in the film, and would include four songs by each of them, rather than the one song each they performed in the film. And the album would be out on Chess. But the album would include the previously-released songs that Freed was credited with co-writing, and the new songs would be published, not by the publishing companies that published those artists' songs, but by one of Levy's companies. Chuck Berry was tricked into signing his rights to the song away by a standard Leonard Chess tactic -- he was called into Chess' office to receive a large royalty cheque, and Chess asked him if while he was there he would mind signing this other document that needed signing, only could he do it in a hurry, because Chess had an urgent appointment? It was six months until Berry realised that he'd signed away the rights to "You Can't Catch Me", and twenty-eight years before he was able to reclaim the copyright for himself. In the meantime, the rights to that one Chuck Berry song made Levy far more money than he could possibly have expected, because of this one line: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "You Can't Catch Me"] In 1969, John Lennon took that line and used it as the opening line for the Beatles song "Come Together": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Come Together"] Rather than go through the courts, Levy and Lennon came to an agreement -- Lennon was going to make an album of rock and roll covers, and he would include at least three songs to which Levy owned the copyright, including "You Can't Catch Me". As a result, even after Levy finally lost the rights to the song in the early 1980s, he still continued earning money from John Lennon's cover versions of two other songs he owned, which would never have been recorded without him having owned “You Can't Catch Me”. "You Can't Catch Me" was a flop, and didn't even make the R&B charts, let alone the pop charts. This even though its B-side, "Havana Moon", would in a roundabout way end up being Berry's most influential song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Havana Moon"] We'll talk about just how influential that song was in a year or so… Berry knew he had to pivot, and fast. He wrote a new song, "Rock and Roll Music", which he thought could maybe have the same kind of success as "Roll Over Beethoven", but used the more currently-popular term rock and roll rather than talking about "rhythm and blues" as the earlier song did. But while he demoed that, it wasn't a song that he could be certain would directly get right into the head of every teenage kid in America. For that, he turned to Johnnie Johnson again. For years, Johnson had had his own theme song at the Cosmopolitan Club. In its original form the song was based on "Honky Tonk Train Blues" by Meade "Lux" Lewis: [Excerpt: Meade "Lux" Lewis, "Honky Tonk Train Blues"] Johnson's own take on the song had kept Lewis' intro, and had been renamed "Johnnie's Boogie": [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, "Johnnie's Boogie"] Johnson suggested to Berry that they take that intro and have Berry play the same thing, but on the guitar. When he did, they found that when he played his guitar, it was like ringing a bell -- a school bell, to be precise. And that gave Berry the idea for the lyric: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "School Day"] "School Day" was the pivot point, the song with which Chuck Berry turned wholly towards teenage concerns, and away from those of adults. The description of the drudgery of life in school was not that different from the descriptions of working life in "Too Much Monkey Business", but it was infinitely more relatable to the new young rock and roll audience than anything in the earlier song. And not only that, the slow trudge of school life gets replaced, in the final verses, with an anthem to the new music: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "School Day"] "School Day" became the biggest-selling single ever to be released by Chess to that point. It hit number one on the R&B charts, knocking "All Shook Up" by Elvis off the top, and made number five on the Billboard pop charts. It charted in the UK, which given Chess' lack of distribution over here at that point was a minor miracle, and it stayed on the Billboard pop chart for an astonishing six months. "School Day" was successful enough that Berry was given an album release of his own. "After School Session" was a compilation of tracks Berry had released as either the A- or B-sides of singles, including "School Day", "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", "Too Much Monkey Business", and "Havana Moon", but not including "You Can't Catch Me" or the other songs on the "Rock Rock Rock" compilation. It was filled out with a couple of generic blues instrumentals, but was otherwise a perfect representation of where Berry was artistically, right at this turning point. And that shows even in the title of the record. The name "After School Session" obviously refers to "School Day", and to the kids in the song going to listen to rock and roll after school ended, but it was also a tip of the hat to another song, one which may have inspired the lyrics to "School Day" in much the same way that Meade "Lux" Lewis had inspired the music: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "After School Swing Session (Swinging With Symphony Sid)"] Even at his most up-to-date, Chuck Berry was still paying homage to Louis Jordan. "School Day" was the point where Chuck Berry went from middling rhythm and blues star to major rock and roll star, and his next twelve records would all make the Billboard pop charts. 1957 was going to be Chuck Berry's year, and we'll hear how in a few weeks time, when we look at another Louis Jordan influenced song, about a kid who played the guitar...

How tough do the tough conversations get in your band? Today Paul and Dave talk through some of their experiences with that, especially as it relates to band members relative preparedness levels. Yeah, that's a mouthful, and that's not all there is in this episode. Your two favorite weekend warriors have been busy. Paul's been digging into what it takes to raise your price, and he and Dave talk through that. Dave's been busy with two tech weeks happening simultaneously this week... and that meant he ignored one of his superstitions... and got caught! Hear all about this and more during Gig Gab. Press play and enjoy! 00:00:00 Gig Gab 167 – Monday, May 28, 2018 00:01:57 Double Tech Week Mad Haus Grease at ORHS 00:07:06 Too Much Monkey Business… and Too Much 50s Music 00:08:58 Superstitions 00:12:38 Improvising Solutions in the Moment 00:15:21 Raising the Pricing Bar Believe the price for which you’re selling 00:18:16 Set the price 00:22:33 Understand your leverage 00:24:20 Quoting The Brilliant Professional Billy Joel 00:28:07 Tough Conversations “Everybody does the same work” 00:35:50 Spot-checking vs. Illuminating Unpreparedness 00:38:31 Rehearsal is not the place where you learn the song 00:41:24 Learn what corners to cut 00:44:20 GG 167

This week, Ken, Allan and Steve take up the songs from the Beatles' BBC recordings that weren't originally released on their albums, such as "Too Much Monkey Business" and "Soldier of Love." As always, we welcome your thoughts about this episode of the show or any other episode. We invite you to send your comments about this or any of our other shows to our email address thingswesaidtodayradioshow@gmail.com, join our "Things We Said Today Beatles Fans" Facebook page and comment there, tweet us at @thingswesaidfab or catch us each on Facebook and give us your thoughts. And we thank you very much for listening. You can hear and download our show on Podbean, the Podbean app and iTunes and stream us through the Tune In Radio app and from our very own YouTube page.  Our shows appear just about every week. Please be sure and write a review of our show on our iTunes page. If you subscribe to any of our program providers, you'll get the first word as soon as a new show is available. We don't want you to miss us. And thank you very much for your continued support. Our download numbers have been rising steadily each week as more people discover us and it's all because of you! So we thank you very much for supporting us.

Chuck Berry 　　　　超越贝多芬，把这个消息告诉柴柯夫斯基。”　　布鲁斯、乡村、一点点的拉丁…在上个世纪五十年代中期，Chuck Berry将这些音乐风格全部融入到了他的个人招牌式的摇滚当中。作为当时的吉他灵魂人物之一，Chuck创造了最基本的12小节摇滚solo的乐句模式，他的吉他licks至今仍被众多的吉他手模仿和研究。他在舞台上弹奏吉他时跳着滑稽的"鸭子步"和煽情的摇摆舞也是让众多歌迷疯狂地爱上吉他音乐的原因。六十年代，两支欧美最受欢迎的摇滚乐队Beatles和the Rolling Stones都受到了Chuck Berry的影响。可以说正是Chuck这位黑人开创了白人摇滚的神话。 　　忘记"猫王"吧，Chuck Berry才是真正的摇滚乐之父。他汇集布鲁斯和乡村音乐的风格，以激烈的吉他演奏标志着吉他这种乐器开始成为摇滚乐中的重要角色。Berry用大音量的吉他licks和充满暗示的歌词着实把50年代的一本正经的听众们惊呆了。人们从那时开始意识到摇滚乐有着超越贝多芬的力量。显示活力的double stop（在独奏中同时弹奏两个和弦音）和轻松幽默的推弦是他的演奏特点。 　　作为杰出的词曲作者、歌手和乐手， Chuck Berry已成为以后那些富于自制力的摇滚艺术家们卓越的楷模。如果没有他，The Rolling Stones乐队的Keith Richard乃至Bob Dylan甚至Beatles的出现都是不可想象的。 列农说过：如果要给摇滚乐一个名字，只能是 Chuck Berry。　　Chuck Berry，摇滚乐真正的先行者，凭着一把老吉他在摇滚乐这片待开垦的草原上纵横驰骋，挥洒自如。滚石杂志在吹捧猫王的时候说，“很多人都认为摇滚乐是1954年在孟菲斯诞生的”，但这话绝对经不起推敲，1954年猫王才刚出道，Chuck Berry却已经驾轻就熟地弹着吉他唱起他自己的摇滚作品了。　　这张专辑精选了Chuck Berry在1955－1965年间最为脍炙人口的28首歌，曲风很明显是从乡村民谣向摇滚过渡的风格，欢快舒畅，清新质朴，毫无矫饰，听着让人情不自禁地想要一起边唱边跳。Chuck Berry是个如此伟大的吉他手、创作者和歌手，60年代大红大紫的民谣和摇滚歌手无不受到他的音乐熏陶，有人说，如果没有他，Beatles、Bob Dylan等人的出现全都是不可想象的。　　然而，就是这样不知影响了多少人的经典专辑在滚石500张最强专辑的排行榜中却仅仅名列第21位，对此我不得不说，滚石的标准又一次让人看不懂了。　　（引自bbb朋友在http://lib.VeryCD.com/2006/05/27/0000104474.html的介绍）　　Lionel Chuck Berry：布鲁斯、乡村、一点点的拉丁…在上个世纪五十年代中期，Chuck Berry将这些音乐风格全部融入到了他的个人招牌式的摇滚当中。作为当时的吉他灵魂人物之一，Chuck创造了最基本的12小节摇滚solo的乐句模式，他的吉他licks至今仍被众多的吉他手模仿和研究。他在舞台上弹奏吉他时跳着滑稽的"鸭子步"和煽情的摇摆舞也是让众多歌迷疯狂地爱上吉他音乐的原因。六十年代，两支欧美最受欢迎的摇滚乐队Beatles和the Rolling Stones都受到了Chuck Berry的影响。可以说正是Chuck这位黑人开创了白人摇滚的神话。　　忘记"猫王"吧，Chuck Berry才是真正的摇滚乐之父。他汇集布鲁斯和乡村音乐的风格，以激烈的吉他演奏标志着吉他这种乐器开始成为摇滚乐中的重要角色。Berry用大音量的吉他licks和充满暗示的歌词着实把50年代的一本正经的听众们惊呆了。人们从那时开始意识到摇滚乐有着超越贝多芬的力量。显示活力的double stop（在独奏中同时弹奏两个和弦音）和轻松幽默的推弦是他的演奏特点。　　Chuck Berry有时很像一个马戏团里的表演者：他把吉他放在脑袋后面或者双腿之间弹奏，像鸭子那样走路。他从中享受着莫大的乐趣，一切在他手中，都显得如此的从容自然。当一支乐队开始操练他们的音乐的时候，他们必须听一听Chuck Berry。如果你想学习摇滚乐，如果你想玩摇滚乐，你就得从听Chuck Berry开始，没办法，这是必须完成的功课。”　　Chuck Berry在37年前，说：“超越贝多芬，把这个消息告诉柴柯夫斯基。”他凝缩了1956年摇滚乐迷们对古典音乐的态度。如今摇滚乐的历史并未按照当年乐迷们的最基本的观点写下去。 摇滚乐的历史是由那些诸如Chuck Berry本人等根本不屑一顾、根本不注意他们来自何处，并写出十分美妙音乐的音乐家们写下去的。　　作为杰出的词曲作者、歌手和乐手， Chuck Berry已成为以后那些富于自制力的摇滚艺术家们卓越的楷模。如果没有他，The Rolling Stones乐队的Keith Richard乃至Bob Dylan甚至Beatles的出现都是不可想象的。Berry创造了青少年们自己的民谣，展现了亚文化群的语言、习俗、风格、态度和日常生活（例如 School Days一曲中表现的枯燥的学校生活）。对于他目睹并经历过的社会病，他也不曾回避：Brown-Eyed Handsome Man一曲中反映的种族歧视问题；Memphis一曲中反映的单亲家庭问题；Too Much Monkey Business一曲中对单调工作的厌烦等等。《The Great Twenty-Eight》是Berry的拉什莫尔峰（美国南达科他州的一座著名山峰，其上雕刻有华盛顿、杰斐逊、林肯和西奥多•罗斯福的巨大石头像），直至今日，它仍是不容超越的。

Chuck Berry 　　　　超越贝多芬，把这个消息告诉柴柯夫斯基。”　　布鲁斯、乡村、一点点的拉丁…在上个世纪五十年代中期，Chuck Berry将这些音乐风格全部融入到了他的个人招牌式的摇滚当中。作为当时的吉他灵魂人物之一，Chuck创造了最基本的12小节摇滚solo的乐句模式，他的吉他licks至今仍被众多的吉他手模仿和研究。他在舞台上弹奏吉他时跳着滑稽的"鸭子步"和煽情的摇摆舞也是让众多歌迷疯狂地爱上吉他音乐的原因。六十年代，两支欧美最受欢迎的摇滚乐队Beatles和the Rolling Stones都受到了Chuck Berry的影响。可以说正是Chuck这位黑人开创了白人摇滚的神话。 　　忘记"猫王"吧，Chuck Berry才是真正的摇滚乐之父。他汇集布鲁斯和乡村音乐的风格，以激烈的吉他演奏标志着吉他这种乐器开始成为摇滚乐中的重要角色。Berry用大音量的吉他licks和充满暗示的歌词着实把50年代的一本正经的听众们惊呆了。人们从那时开始意识到摇滚乐有着超越贝多芬的力量。显示活力的double stop（在独奏中同时弹奏两个和弦音）和轻松幽默的推弦是他的演奏特点。 　　作为杰出的词曲作者、歌手和乐手， Chuck Berry已成为以后那些富于自制力的摇滚艺术家们卓越的楷模。如果没有他，The Rolling Stones乐队的Keith Richard乃至Bob Dylan甚至Beatles的出现都是不可想象的。 列农说过：如果要给摇滚乐一个名字，只能是 Chuck Berry。　　Chuck Berry，摇滚乐真正的先行者，凭着一把老吉他在摇滚乐这片待开垦的草原上纵横驰骋，挥洒自如。滚石杂志在吹捧猫王的时候说，“很多人都认为摇滚乐是1954年在孟菲斯诞生的”，但这话绝对经不起推敲，1954年猫王才刚出道，Chuck Berry却已经驾轻就熟地弹着吉他唱起他自己的摇滚作品了。　　这张专辑精选了Chuck Berry在1955－1965年间最为脍炙人口的28首歌，曲风很明显是从乡村民谣向摇滚过渡的风格，欢快舒畅，清新质朴，毫无矫饰，听着让人情不自禁地想要一起边唱边跳。Chuck Berry是个如此伟大的吉他手、创作者和歌手，60年代大红大紫的民谣和摇滚歌手无不受到他的音乐熏陶，有人说，如果没有他，Beatles、Bob Dylan等人的出现全都是不可想象的。　　然而，就是这样不知影响了多少人的经典专辑在滚石500张最强专辑的排行榜中却仅仅名列第21位，对此我不得不说，滚石的标准又一次让人看不懂了。　　（引自bbb朋友在http://lib.VeryCD.com/2006/05/27/0000104474.html的介绍）　　Lionel Chuck Berry：布鲁斯、乡村、一点点的拉丁…在上个世纪五十年代中期，Chuck Berry将这些音乐风格全部融入到了他的个人招牌式的摇滚当中。作为当时的吉他灵魂人物之一，Chuck创造了最基本的12小节摇滚solo的乐句模式，他的吉他licks至今仍被众多的吉他手模仿和研究。他在舞台上弹奏吉他时跳着滑稽的"鸭子步"和煽情的摇摆舞也是让众多歌迷疯狂地爱上吉他音乐的原因。六十年代，两支欧美最受欢迎的摇滚乐队Beatles和the Rolling Stones都受到了Chuck Berry的影响。可以说正是Chuck这位黑人开创了白人摇滚的神话。　　忘记"猫王"吧，Chuck Berry才是真正的摇滚乐之父。他汇集布鲁斯和乡村音乐的风格，以激烈的吉他演奏标志着吉他这种乐器开始成为摇滚乐中的重要角色。Berry用大音量的吉他licks和充满暗示的歌词着实把50年代的一本正经的听众们惊呆了。人们从那时开始意识到摇滚乐有着超越贝多芬的力量。显示活力的double stop（在独奏中同时弹奏两个和弦音）和轻松幽默的推弦是他的演奏特点。　　Chuck Berry有时很像一个马戏团里的表演者：他把吉他放在脑袋后面或者双腿之间弹奏，像鸭子那样走路。他从中享受着莫大的乐趣，一切在他手中，都显得如此的从容自然。当一支乐队开始操练他们的音乐的时候，他们必须听一听Chuck Berry。如果你想学习摇滚乐，如果你想玩摇滚乐，你就得从听Chuck Berry开始，没办法，这是必须完成的功课。”　　Chuck Berry在37年前，说：“超越贝多芬，把这个消息告诉柴柯夫斯基。”他凝缩了1956年摇滚乐迷们对古典音乐的态度。如今摇滚乐的历史并未按照当年乐迷们的最基本的观点写下去。 摇滚乐的历史是由那些诸如Chuck Berry本人等根本不屑一顾、根本不注意他们来自何处，并写出十分美妙音乐的音乐家们写下去的。　　作为杰出的词曲作者、歌手和乐手， Chuck Berry已成为以后那些富于自制力的摇滚艺术家们卓越的楷模。如果没有他，The Rolling Stones乐队的Keith Richard乃至Bob Dylan甚至Beatles的出现都是不可想象的。Berry创造了青少年们自己的民谣，展现了亚文化群的语言、习俗、风格、态度和日常生活（例如 School Days一曲中表现的枯燥的学校生活）。对于他目睹并经历过的社会病，他也不曾回避：Brown-Eyed Handsome Man一曲中反映的种族歧视问题；Memphis一曲中反映的单亲家庭问题；Too Much Monkey Business一曲中对单调工作的厌烦等等。《The Great Twenty-Eight》是Berry的拉什莫尔峰（美国南达科他州的一座著名山峰，其上雕刻有华盛顿、杰斐逊、林肯和西奥多•罗斯福的巨大石头像），直至今日，它仍是不容超越的。

Johnny Kyle Cook and Brandon Shockney agree: Jon touches his face way too Goddamn much. Are they right? Are they wrong? Perhaps we'll never know! What we do know is Johnny has returned to help us burn through YET ANOTHER five episodes of the classic (?) sitcom's fifth season. Those episodes: Crushed; Spellbound; Too Much Monkey Business; The Devil Made Me Do It, and Driving Miss D.J. There's a lot to unpack here, including appearances by singer Tommy Page and a straight up fucking monkey. Did the monkey send Jon down a conspiratorial rabbit hole worthy of JFK? Yes. Is Brandon's favorite off-brand soda going to surprise and disturb you? Yes. You know, you ask too many questions, maybe stop ASKING and start LISTENING. XOXO

„Við erum að fíla „Too Much Monkey Business“ hérna. Þarna er þetta að hefjast. Holden Caulfield er búinn að marinerast í nokkur ár þarna og Rebel Without a Cause með James Dean er ennþá heit í kvikmyndasýningavélunum. Það þurfti bara smá push til að klára málið og Chuck Berry sá um það,“ segir Bergur Ebbi […]